THE STRUGGLE FOR 
IMMORTALITY 

9 



BY 

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1889 



The Library 

of Congress 

WASHINGTON 

Copyright, 1889, 
By ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.,U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & ( 



CONTENTS. 



« 

PAGE 

I. What is a Fact ? 1 

II. Is God Good ? 32 

III. What does Revelation Reveal ? *79 

IV. The Struggle for Immortality 119 

V. The Christianity of Christ 160 

VI. The Psychical Opportunity 195 

VII. The Psychical Wave 223 



Several of these essays are reprinted from u The 
North American Review " and " The Forum." 



THE 



STEUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 
L 

WHAT IS A FACT ? 

This is a noisy age. The dreamer can find 
no sacred silence in which to hide his fantasy. 
The thinker may double-lock his study door, 
but the winds of heaven will pilfer his thoughts 
from him through the window, and the birds 
of the air will carry the matter ; if they do 
not, the world concludes that there was none 
to carry. The believer, too, is tremulous to 
the vibrations of the atmosphere. His mys- 
ticism and quietism come by the hardest. If 
he have a faith, he feels that he must believe 
aloud. On every hand the air is quick with 
clamors. The " advanced mind " shouts to the 
scientist. The theologian thunders at the in- 
fidel. The ecclesiastic menaces the liberal 
Christian. The philosopher sneers at each. 



2 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



Kepresenting none of these wise and urgent 
people, the writer of this fragment is moved 
to say a word concerning that considerable 
portion of humanity who walk outside the cir- 
cle of this portentous amphitheatre, yet near 
enough to be alert to its contests as well as 
deafened by its din. To these honest, quiet, 
and thoughtful people, who in all militant eras 
press nearest to the combatants, constituting 
at once their busiest critics and truest friends, 
it seems, if I mistake not, as if the main ques- 
tion in dispute were one uncommonly easy to 
ask and uncommonly hard to answer. 

It is a long time ago since our great-grand- 
fathers were crossing lances over the doctrine 
of imputed sin, or the souls of infants con- 
demned by predestination and foreknowledge 
absolute to an eternal hell. A damned baby 
at best was a theory. Nobody ever saw one. 

This is not the age of theory ; hence we long 
since took our babies to be blessed by One 
who thought it worth while to mention the 
fact that of such was the kingdom of heaven. 
Thus we care no more whether we are to be 
punished for the sin of Adam, having enough 
of our own to look to, to say nothing of the 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



s 



additional doubt whether Adam himself can be 
called a fact. This, we find, is the age of fact. 
No one asks to-day, What is your theory? but, 
Where is your fact ? 

So, at least, it seems to these good people of 
whom I speak, who compose what we call " the 
masses" of the church and the world. The 
young man of business, who sits under your 
preaching from Sunday to Sunday, Reverend 
sir, watches you with a keen but yet with a 
slightly saddened eye. Whether this be an age 
for the encouragement of faith or the preser- 
vation of doctrine he is not sure. Whether he 
has fallen upon an era of inductive or deduc- 
tive reasoning he does not know ; it is prob- 
able that he does not care. But, that forces 
which he does not understand are threatening 
faiths that he reveres, he does know ; and for 
this, in a downright, manly fashion, he does 
care very much indeed. 

The thoughtful woman at the head of the 
crowded Bible class w r hich has given such 
celebrity to your Sunday-school is puzzled, too. 
She no longer finds Barnes's Notes adequate 
to the religious difficulties of her observant, 
critical, restless pupils ; she no longer teaches, 



4 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



either, that the world was made in six days, 
or that the majority of the human race are 
doomed by a loving Father to an eternal strug- 
gle with a lake of material fire. She has heard 
the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel and even 
the original authorship of the Golden Rule 
called in question. She has a general impres- 
sion that Darwin is to blame, and that geology 
is at the bottom of the trouble. She finds 
this, however, less satisfactory as an argument 
than might be, when her pet convert, nineteen 
wise years of age, announces that he will im- 
mediately become a free-thinker, on the ground 
that, next to immorality, there is nothing he so 
much prays to be delivered from as supersti- 
tion. Perhaps she learns, as some of us have, 
to assume in general the uselessness of discus- 
sion with the initial moods of " emancipated 
minds." 

So, perhaps, our friend, the young pew- 
owner, feeling himself unable to hold his 
ground with the fellows at the club, yet all the 
fonder of the faith which he cannot defend, as 
the father is of the child whom he sees sur- 
rendering to a stealthy disease, saddens a little 
more and more, but joins himself to the great 



WHAT IS A FACT f 



5 



rank and file of the silent believers, who try- 
to be good fellows, and hope the Lord will 
clear things up some day. He thinks it would 
be natural to be able to give good reasons for 
believing anything so important as the Chris- 
tian religion, — good business reasons, that 
were clear as the code of ethics on 'change, 
and as much to be respected, whether to be 
obeyed or not, — but finds no such reasons 
causing such respect, and gradually ceases to 
look for any. 

It is safe to say that a part of the difficulties 
which our friends meet would be relieved, if 
they could more distinctly, or at least more 
clearly, define in their own minds some start- 
ing-point — without agreement upon which it 
is impossible to debate differences of either 
judgment or feeling, and for lack of which so 
many of our religious discussions are as wasted 
as the powder and blood of Malvern Hill. 

The average religious argument of to-day 
takes, perhaps, some such form as this, — 
the disputants, we may suppose, not having 
reached that stage of familiarity with each 
other's views at which controversy is tacitly 
and mutually conceded to be no accretion 
either to friendship or to faith. 



6 



WHAT IS A FACTf 



The believer — we use this term and its 
opposite as, on the whole, less objectionable 
and more precise than any others which exist- 
ing religious conflict has popularized — the 
believer begins by timidly expressing a hope 
that the unbeliever has " found Christ," or " is 
a Christian," or " is a man of faith." The 
unbeliever promptly and not at all timidly 
expresses his complete dissent from every 
point of conviction involved in these phrases. 
He may do this arrogantly or sadly, honestly 
or shrewdly, earnestly or flippantly, gently 
or maliciously, but he does it with decision. 
He speaks of the scientific paradoxes in the 
" poem of Genesis," of the morals of the Old 
Testament saints, of the physical impossibility 
of miracles, of the discoveries of geology, of 
personal imperfections in the character of 
Jesus, of the superior nature of Socrates, of 
the howling dervish, the negro revivals, and 
the damnation of children, — an article of 
faith which he asserts is generally wrought into 
the creeds of Christian churches of the present 
day, and secretly disavowed by kind-hearted 
but hypocritical people, who have not the cour- 
age openly to combat so monstrous a doctrine. 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



7 



At this point, the believer strikes in rather 
warmly, and if he does not reply that such ig- 
norance on any other vital point of contempo- 
rary difference would condemn his opponent to 
the strongest criticism of intelligent people, is 
tempted to do so, and feels a little out of tem- 
per and a little penitent, and suggests that the 
Bible is an inspired book, written by God for 
men and through men, and that we must 
expect to find difficulties in it, and earnestly 
and pointedly asks, Where will you find, on 
the whole, a better book for the guidance of 
human weakness ? 

The unbeliever replies that there is much 
fine poetry in the Bible, but more bad argu- 
ment, Oriental superstition, and confused met- 
aphor ; that many men are inspired ; that 
Goethe was a divine man ; and that Brown- 
ing's Paracelsus is as much a work of inspi- 
ration as the Song of Solomon, and far more 
moral. He adds that it is impossible to recon- 
cile God's sovereignty with man's freedom in 
any such make-shift manner as that adopted 
by the theologians, and that God either cre- 
ated sin, or he did not ; that if he did he was 
not benevolent, and if he did not he was not 



8 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



omnipotent ; and that we are made to cultivate 
our manhood, express our individuality, and 
study the secrets of nature. 

The believer suggests that it may be possi- 
ble we do not, as finite beings, understand all 
the mysteries in the nature of an infinite God ; 
that it is not to be wondered at if we must 
leave some points unexplained ; that this is 
perhaps a part of the discipline necessary to fit 
us for the eternal life. 

The unbeliever hastens to say that of the 
eternal life we know absolutely nothing, — we 
cannot conceive of either beginning or end ; 
that we are here and know it, but further than 
this we have no right to infer. We may cher- 
ish immortality only as a " solemn hope " (the 
believer's eyes fill, and he mentally ejaculates, 
" Poor fellow ! or we may expect to be as 
the beasts that perish, and live on in the forces 
of nature, and the resurrection of the seasons, 
and the memories of unborn generations, and 
so on, but that geology is making every hour 
discoveries which are to revolutionize belief; 
that hope, faith, love, and the. energies of im- 
agination are beautiful fancies, but rocks are 
facts, and therefore (as nearly as the believer 



WE AT IS A FACT? 



9 



can understand) he urges that we cling to the 
rocks. 

The believer suggests that rocks are cold 
comfort ; to the bereaved, for instance, or the 
remorseful. 

The unbeliever replies, vaguely, that he is 
not sure, either, that we comprehend the differ- 
ence between infinite or finite — Finite ? In- 
finite ? He is not certain that there is any in- 
finite, or that he himself, in short, is finite — 
but that science — And so on, and so on. 

Now, all this is firing wild. There is no 
gold in the target. There shows no target in 
the mist. If we set our aim in a fog-bank, 
who is to decide whether we have hit ? 

The believer may seek to " save " the unbe- 
liever in this fashion till " the eve of the day 
of the Last Awaking," — he will only irritate. 
The doubting may try to "reason" with the 
trusting on this wise, till his tongue returns to 
the dust that he claims his kin to, — he can 
only depress. The disputants have swerved 
from the most elementary of the principles of 
logic. They have discovered no major premise 
in common. They must agree upon something 
before they can disagree intelligently about 



10 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



anything. There can be no dispute without a 
basis of harmony. " We may never, perhaps," 
as Hamilton says, " arrive at truth, but we 
can always avoid self-contradiction." 

Let us now suppose, as it is the object of 
this paper to suggest, that these two equally 
earnest people ask of each other, at the outset 
of all sincere and serious discussion, one sim- 
ple question : What is a Fact f 

The believer, we will assume, happens to put 
the query. The unbeliever hesitates. Neither 
of the disputants are psychological scholars. 
Both are intelligently educated. The unbe- 
liever is the more accustomed of the two, 
probably, to sophistries of discussion. He 
perceives the importance of the point, and 
hesitates. It is one of the maxims of civil 
law that definitions are hazardous. After a 
thoughtful pause, he replies, with the blunt 
courage of common sense, which is quite as apt 
to hit the truth as the sharply refined point of 
the artist in philosophical language, that he 
should say a fact was a thing that could be 
verified. 

To this the believer, without hesitation, 
agrees. All he claims, he adds, is that religion 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



11 



is a matter of fact as well as science. Grant 
this, he urges, and we can pursue our discus- 
sion. Deny it, and the sooner we agree to dis- 
agree the better. The believers own vision 
has begun to clarify, with this closer exactness 
of definition, and his method of expression in- 
tensifies. 

The unbeliever replies, with animation, that 
it is impossible to put religion and science 
upon the same foot-hold. We have, he urges, 
reached the age of reason — at last. It is no 
longer practicable for intelligent men to bend 
their necks to the yoke of superstition. We 
deal no more with a realm of fancy. Jesus 
was a rhapsodist. Christianity was full of 
poetry. It appealed to the imaginative era. 
We have passed by the birth-time of great 
poets. Literature acknowledges it. We do 
not now write epics. We invent the phono- 
graph. Machinery, discovery, action, have 
replaced reverie, credulity, and dreams. We 
no longer pray. We telegraph. We have no 
time to sing psalms. We are engaged in the 
artificial propagation of fish. Why should we 
attend church when we can await the spon- 
taneous generation of animalcule in a bottle 
of boiled water ? 



12 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



At this point the listener smiles, and the 
speaker breaks off with some irritation. He 
sees nothing to smile at. He is very much 
in earnest. These are serious subjects which 
he has mentioned. He is indeed more logical 
than he had seemed, and abruptly turning 
upon his opponent says, — 

You ask me for my facts. I find them in 
the investigation of nature. Observe them. 
They alone are worthy of confidence. We 
seek, we study, we combine, we infer. The 
human mind was created — 

By whom ? interrupts the believer. 

Consistently, the unbeliever replies that he 
does not know. The powers of nature, for- 
merly called God, have not yet fully revealed 
themselves to our ken. I believe nothing that 
I do not understand. I will not accept what 
I cannot prove. This is the first duty of the 
human reason. Man should receive only what 
he knows. I find myself a mysterious being 
in a mysterious condition. My business is to 
investigate my condition. Whether there be 
another world is none of my concern. No eye 
has seen it, no foot has returned from it, no 
voice has spoken from it ; it is an absolutely 



WHAT IS A FACT? ^3 

unproved, and therefore unprovable, hypothe- 
sis. I find myself in the present world. I 
have occupation in the study of my limitations. 
There are mountains, the sea, the stars, the 
earth. There are geology, astronomy, the 
nautical sciences, the study of human diseases, 
the mysteries and cultus of the physical organ- 
ization. I learn from the fossil and the scal- 
pel. The telescope and the microscope, the 
chart and the battery, command my attention. 
These give me the undeniable. Exact inves- 
tigation presents me with my facts. Beyond 
a fact I am not justified in going. 

Where is God ? Can you handle him ? 
What is prayer ? Go weigh it for me ! An 
immortal soul ? My microscope has never re- 
vealed it. A fact is a thing revealed or reveal- 
able to my senses. Science alone is knowledge. 
Religion is superstition. Superstition is bond- 
age. I decline to be fettered. Christianity 
is slavery. I choose freedom. Exact thought 
is my master. 1 And thus, and thus, and thus. 

1 "He could not accept Christianity ' said Renan of 
Spinoza (I quote from memory), at a celebration in honor 
of that philosopher's memory. " He could not thus surren- 
der his liberty. Descartes was his master " / 



14 



WHAT JS A FACT! 



As the discussion waxes, the believer is op- 
pressed more and more with the hopelessness, 
but not the helplessness of his effort. In pro- 
portion as he learns the difficulty of dissuading 
a man from views hardened as they are ac- 
quired by the friction of dissent from heredi- 
tary faiths, he gains nerve for his own processes 
of thought, and muscle for his own maturing 
belief. If nothing more comes out of the con- 
versation, his faith at least is stouter for it. If 
he has not " converted " the free-thinker, he 
has himself become a better Christian. 

He who believes much has always the ad- 
vantage over him who believes little or noth- 
ing. Faith is the positive, as skepticism is 
a negation. He who affirms intelligently and 
earnestly carries by a sheer moral propulsion, 
as irresistible as the channel of Niagara, a 
power, not unlike the primal awe of nature, 
over him who denies. 

Let us hope that our believer returns upon 
his antagonist a few ringing words, to which 
there can be no more convincing reply than 
the eternal and unassailable finality : I do not 
agree with you. 

You seek, the believer says, the truth, — the 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



15 



whole and holy and invulnerable truth. I seek 
no other. You desire a religion of facts. I 
also wish the same. You demand that we con- 
struct belief from reason. I, too, prefer a rea- 
son for my conclusions. You claim that you 
alone possess a basis of fact, since you only re- 
strict yourself to what is known. You claim 
that you find the known alone in physical man- 
ifestations, their formulae and solutions. I 
deny your claim. 

I deny your claim, because (you will pardon 
me) of what seems to me its ignorance. You 
forget, or you have never learned, that truth is 
no niggard, and that science is a broad and 
bounteous term. It is not alone in the hard 
bosom of the rock that the Eternal rests. It 
is not only in the fumes of the laboratory that 
the breath of the devout seeker exhales, There 
are trained intellects that are not occupied 
with the germ theory, or with the latest trea- 
tise on the parasites of an unfortunate plant. 
There are students, as there are scholars, of 
other than material knowledges. You forget 
that there are to be found other than the phy- 
sical sciences. You forget that the history of 
these other sciences commemorates much of 



16 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



the highest order of intellect, the most precise 
training, the most generous culture, the most 
candid research, and the purest sacrifice of self 
in the investigation of truth that human life 
has known. 

You forget, in short (or you have never 
learned), that the mental sciences exist. 
You have not remembered that there is a 
philosophy of mind, as there is of matter ; 
that there is a philosophy of soul, as there is of 
sense. 

One need not be a very learned person to re- 
call the facts that the sciences of ethics, of in- 
tellectual philosophy (even of theology, though 
for the sake of controversial comfort we may 
waive that irritating illustration), have still 
respectable positions in the world of thought, 
quite in rank with mathematics or chemistry. 
It has slipped your mind, for the moment, that 
there is a study of Metaphysics as well as of 
Physics. You have not articulately under- 
stood that a sufficient culture overlooks neither 
the existence of these two forms of human 
knowledge, nor their relative importance and 
adjustment to each other. 

And this leads me to say (once more I pray 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



17 



your courtesy) that I deny your claim because 
of what seems to me its arrogance. 

One need not be very learned, I repeat, to 
understand something of the debt which the 
students of matter owe to the students of mind. 
You and I are not learned, only intelligent 
people, and the intelligent have heard some- 
thing of Socrates, of Aristotle, of Bacon ; of 
him who (humanly speaking), it might be said, 
created exact thought, of him who developed it, 
of him who reconstructed it. Mental science, 
as we know, was by centuries the elder born, 
and father of physical science, in any modern 
signification of the word ; as the brain is the 
creator and guide of the movements of the 
hand or foot. 1 

To ignore the parental influence of meta- 
physical upon physical study is a species of 
filial ingratitude which it is impossible to de- 
scribe by a smooth adjective. The very pro- 
cesses of thought by which you are trained to 
investigate the material fact, you owe to ances- 

1 Indeed, the believer might add, we are told by scholars 
that the father of modern intuitionalism was the father of 
modern mathematics as well. Descartes was the first of our 
scientists to study mind in the dissecting-room. 



18 



WE AT IS A FACTf 



tral centuries of mental discipline and to apos- 
tles of mental science. You speak of conscious 
and sub-conscious cerebration. You deny the 
mental entity which you once called a human 
soul. What enables your prompt lip to utter 
the challenge ? Whence comes your power to 
deny ? 

I do not express these things in philosophi- 
cal language, for, as I have reminded you, we 
are neither of us learned people, but I desire 
to make you understand in a plain and direct 
fashion that which I desire to say. Is it be- 
coming, I ask, is it the modesty of wisdom, 
for the instrument to ignore the influence ? 
Shall the microscope and the retort say to the 
eye or the hand, " We have no need of thee " ? 
Shall the probe say to the surgeon, 64 Go to ! 
It is I who tear or torture, as it is I who heal 
and save " ? Speaking of his scientific con- 
freres, one of the most distinguished phy- 
sicians whom this country has known said, 
" They cannot account for the ' I? " 

In short, it seems to me that when a man 
exalts the science of things which are seen and 
touched over the science of that which sees and 
touches ; when he prefers to mistake a convo- 



WHAT JS A FACT? 



19 



lution in the brain for that by which the con- 
volution becomes able to think, feel, and act, 
— nay, by which alone it is enabled to make 
the mistake ; when he selects the less for the 
greater, the lower for the loftier, matter for 
mind, brain for soul, he exhibits the presump- 
tion of the servant, sent by his master to cash 
a check of important value, who struts as if 
the money were his own. 

I object to your claim because, once more, 
I perceive it to be a degrading one. It is 
not necessary to be great ourselves to know 
that the great natures of the earth have been 
believing natures. Even you and I can re- 
member that music, poetry, art, philosophy, 
literature, nay, physics itself, owe something 
to faith. It is not easy to forget that Bee- 
thoven, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mil- 
ton, Dante, Wordsworth, Raphael and Michael 
Angelo, Plato and Immanuel Kant and Leib- 
nitz, Goethe and Shakespeare, Kepler and 
Newton, were believers in the existence of God 
and the immaterial nature and immortal des- 
tiny of the human spirit. It might be com- 
paratively easy to prove that you and I had 
no souls ; to deny one to these people I have 



20 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



mentioned were to go as far as anything could, 
perhaps, to prove that you are right, and that 
we, at least, are destitute of any. 

Degrading, I say, — degrading to the deeps 
below all that is truly fine, all that is del- 
icately observant, all that is highly reveren- 
tial, all that is nobly receptive, all that is ca- 
pable of assimilating the ideal, the beautiful, 
the lofty, and the large in human history, — 
is that view of human mystery which your 
claim presents. It may be either the cause or 
the consequence of this view that you flip- 
pantly ignore the testimony of the great teach- 
ers of human life. You decline to sit at the 
feet of the prophets, priests, and kings of the 
world. You turn your back upon the heights ; 
on art, on inspiration, on intuition, on im- 
agination, on aspiration, on song, on the 
sources of all that makes men clear and keen 
in brain, refined and pure in heart. For re- 
member that if you seek to share these things 
they are no longer properly yours. They are 
not, they never were, they never can be, the 
products of a materialistic philosophy. If this 
is not clear to you, it seems to me that your 
location quite as well as your attitude puts a 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



21 



finely and simply outlined truth out of per- 
spective to you. He who climbs, sees. " To 
him, as to Moses," says a French scholar, 
" secrets unknown to the rabble are revealed 
upon the mountain-top." 

You sit, then, and adjust yourself to the 
valley. You burrow, you dig, you descend. 
Choosing the company of the lowest forms of 
manifestation, you will find that the influence 
of their atmosphere is upon you. If a human 
mind keeps the exclusive society of vegetables 
and insects and fossils, is it to be wondered 
at that it fails to see the transfigured cloud 
which veils, while defining, the motions of the 
eternal sun? If a man's corroding ambition 
is to be quoted as an " authority on potato- 
bugs," he may be a sensitive appreciator of 
Locke's Essay on the Understanding, or the 
" Excursion " of the Lake Poet, or the Gospel 
of John ; but does it surprise us if he is not ? 

Pardon once more my plainness if I tell you 
that I cannot accept your claim, because it 
seems to me not unlike the scoff of the dem- 
onstrator in the dissecting-room. His busi- 
ness leads him to handle flesh. How, then, 
should God be a spirit ? 



22 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



I have somewhat, too, to affirm. You have 
called my attention to your facts ; I should be 
glad to acquaint you with mine. Yours, I ac- 
cept; it is your conclusions which I refuse. 
I do not question the evolution of the species, 
or the zymotic theory of diseases, or the exist- 
ence of the last comet, or the possibilities of 
the photophone, or the discoveries of psycho- 
physics as affecting the criminal or the insane. 
Physical science is welcome to do her best or 
her worst by helpless spectators like yourself 
or me. A fact is a fact, though it deal with 
the lowest phases of nature, and truth is holy, 
whether she hide in a stalactite or an epic, 
a jelly-fish or an oratorio, a vivisection or a 
prayer. I accept your facts, retaining the 
liberty to draw my own conclusions. I only 
ask that you (retaining, of course, the same 
liberty) accept my facts before we close or 
continue this discussion. 

Of this, then, I would remind you. The 
manifestations of mind are at least as much 
to be respected as the manifestations of mat- 
ter. He was a real philosopher who gave to 
his book the title, Man in his Connection with 
the Human Body. What we think and feel 



WHAT IS A FACT? 23 

is as genuine as what we see and touch. If I 
handle a chair or table, my thought of them is 
as individual as the table or the chair. If I 
take a pen to write these words, that which 
creates the words is as real as the pen. " I 
am the soul of the music," said a musician, 
when his string snapped. " Though the strings 
are all broken, the music is there" Let me 
add (for you will remind me that I do not 
touch the pulse of your difficulty) that my 
thought is as real as the brain-cells by whose 
activity I am empowered to think it. 

Thus, if I listen to music which dissuades 
me from temptation, or liffcs me from gloom, 
or leads me to despair, these emotions exist as 
much as the ivory of the piano keys, or the 
catgut of the violin, or the gray matter in the 
cerebrum which the piano, the violin, and the 
emotion set in agitation. I am at least as 
justified in assertion, as you in denial of these 
facts. Explain them as you will. I offer 
them as facts. As such — until you can prove 
that " thought is phosphorus and phosphorus 
is thought," without the predominant action 
of your mind in making that hypothesis — 
they ought to be by you respected. 



24 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



There is a form of the mental life which 
we call spiritual. This is the highest, as it is 
the finest, phase of the mystery that we name 
existence. Coleridge expressed what I mean 
when he said that " faith is itself a higher rea- 
son, and corrects the errors of reason as rea- 
son corrects the errors of sense." As the 
physical life is revealed by its phenomena, as 
the mental life possesses its expression, so the 
spiritual life has its manifestation. This is a 
fact. As such it is to be respected. 

As we depend upon the senses to make clear 
to us the presence of the sunrise, as we rely 
upon the reason to explain to us the nature of 
a thought, so we lean upon faith to reveal to 
us the nature of a spirit. 

While the eye brings to us the color of the 
dawn, it can do no more ; the optic nerve of 
an idiot, though it quiver in precise obedience 
to the laws of his physical organism, for three- 
score years and ten, will never reveal to him 
the rapture of the morning. Sense and reason 
must act together. So the reason, left to it- 
self, informs us of the character of the thought 
or of the feeling which we have about the sun- 
rise ; then it comes, and there it must come, 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



25 



against its limitation. The intellect of a skep- 
tic, though he cultivate it till he is in his 
grave, will never produce a prayer for the 
guidance, or endurance, or delight of the day 
that is about to be his. Reason and faith must 
work together. So, we might add, faith, as a 
disconnected faculty, cannot result in true de- 
votion. Unless guided by reason, the devotee 
may become a howling dervish, or a hysteric 
nun. The sense, the mind, and the spirit must 
live together. 

Like the life physical, like the life intel- 
lectual, the spiritual life, while yet confessing 
an interdependence upon these other forms of 
life, possesses, like them, an individual ex- 
istence. 

" My soul to me a kingdom is." In this 
kingdom there are laws : there is obedience or 
disobedience ; there is anarchy or order ; there 
is the separation of government ; there is the 
history of growth or decline. This is a fact. 
As such it is to be respected. 

A broken physical law involves its penalty. 
A denied intellectual law implies a punish- 
ment. A defied spiritual law presumes its 
retribution,, 



26 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



Leap into the ocean ; no opposing law of 
salvation interfering, you will drown. De- 
fraud the hours of rest for study or for dissi- 
pation ; you lose the mental power of control- 
ling natural sleep. Contest against that sur- 
render of the soul to its Creator which we call 
the religious life ; the religious life withdraws 
itself from you. Unbelief closes over the will- 
ing unbeliever like the waves of the sea or the 
tides of insomnia. These are facts. As such 
they are to be respected. 

Again : the great law of development is the 
law of action. Every natural power grows by 
exercise. Any school-boy knows that he can 
create the iron ball of muscle on his arm only 
by the use and training of the muscle. Any 
college girl understands that the various fac- 
ulties of the brain become serviceable only 
through action, as they become through inac- 
tion inert. As with the brawn, as with the 
brain, so with the spirit. 

To exercise spiritual power is to develop 
and strengthen it. To disuse it is to repress 
or extinguish it. 

Now, then, I ask you to remember that we 
who believe, speak to you out of a condition 



WHAT JS A FACT? 



27 



whose government you have defied or ignored ; 
and that we speak of a faculty whose exercise 
you have disused. If we mention the spiritual 
life, we mention that of which you are not a 
citizen, but an exile ; whether by deliberate 
choice or chance misfortune is not to the im- 
mediate purpose, — you are exiled. You have 
not the citizen's right of judgment concerning 
our affairs. You are incompetent to criticise 
this life, because you are not in it. Thus, too, 
if we refer to spiritual power, we refer to 
that which you do not possess, because you do 
not train it ; whether by accident or design is 
not at present to the point, — your spiritual 
faculties are uneducated. You are disqualified 
from apprehending truth by means of powers 
which you have atrophied by disuse. These 
are facts ; as such they ought to be respected. 

Within this spiritual life, by means of ex- 
ercised spiritual faculties acting upon and 
acted upon by our reason, we who believe 
cherish certain spiritual facts. God is one of 
these facts. The immortality of human souls 
is another. The responsibility of conscience 
is yet a third. The hope of a happy life ever- 
lasting is to be counted. The reasonableness of 



28 



WHAT IS A FACTf 



Eevelation we add. The saneness and use- 
fulness of prayer we have certified. To the 
power of the personal life of Jesus Christ we 
thrill to offer witness. To the facts of for- 
given sin and comforted bereavement we bear 
testimony. Is not a penitent and christianized 
thief as demonstrable as a clam or a comet ? 
Is not the ecstasy of a martyr as real as the 
fagots that burn him ? Is not the resignation 
of the desolate mourner as much a matter of 
proof as the coffin or the marble sleeper over 
which he weeps ? 

And yet but once again. As the body has 
its senses, so has the soul. Burns speaks of 
" those senses of the mind " by which great 
religious truths are apprehended. Spiritual 
truth is received by spiritual powers. Spiritual 
fact is perceived by the spiritual eye, heard 
by a spiritual ear, handled by spiritual touch. 
" The true saint," says Dr. Holmes, " can be 
entirely apprehended only by saintly natures." 

We share with you the experience of the 
exercised physical senses, by which you and 
we alike perceive the physical fact. You do 
not as yet share with us — and we lay no 
claim to what is called " saintship " in assert- 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



29 



ing this — the experience of the trained spir- 
itual sense by which we receive the spiritual 
fact. To this extent and for this reason, are 
you as far qualified for making intelligent de- 
ductions from our premises as we for drawing 
such from yours ? 

In asking you to answer this, as an act of 
judicial fairness, we cannot refrain from add- 
ing that it would seem natural for a broad- 
minded and intelligent man to feel a certain 
discontent with the partial nature of his de- 
velopment. He who trains his body and ex- 
ercises his brain, and stops there, is imperfect, 
unbalanced, crude. He who has not sought 
to develop his spiritual nature is a half -edu- 
cated creature. 

Spiritual power is the flower of the human 
growth. In spiritual character we find the 
highest, finest, and most complex form of the 
species. All other nature, whether physical 
or mental, is embryonic to spiritual nature. 
Spiritual culture is the culmination of human 
education. 

We ask, therefore, evidences of this culture, 
as the first qualification in any man towards 
his becoming a critic of such nature, such 



30 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



power, such character, or their philosophy. 
Failing of this culture, your science should, 
we submit, grant to our science the respect 
of ignorance, if not the attention of the stu- 
dent. 

We have known invalids, prisoners of their 
inert muscles during all the bloom and bril- 
liance of life. Some late-found medical in- 
spiration, some personal surrender of devotion 
on the part of a friend, some unexpected joy 
or unimagined grief, or even some electric 
alarm, has allured, or shocked, or startled the 
sick man to his feet. 

The power of motion was not dead, but slept. 
Late and loath though they be, the great flex- 
ile and extensor actions of the great muscles 
begin. Between the grave of his life and the 
grave of his death the man partakes of a 
resurrection. 

Such a discovery of blessedness, we may 
suppose, comes to him who, after the sluggish- 
ness, or willfulness, or disease of unbelieving 
years, is led by the late cultivation of his spir- 
itual faculties to the possession of spiritual 
truth. 



WHAT IS A FACT? 



31 



Facts before which his intellect has been a 
blank illuminate his consciousness. Mysteries 
at which he sneered become shrines before 
which he kneels. Powers which he has not 
hitherto recognized magnify his nature. Hopes 
which he has never known irradiate his life. 
Contrition that he has not understood perme- 
ates his heart. Tenderness which he has never 
approached gives pathos, as it gives purity, to 
his past. A future of which he has never 
dreamed intensifies and glorifies his present. 
He learns the value of his own being, and ex- 
periences the friendship of God. In the clos- 
ing days of his history, as in the final scenes of 
the apocalyptic vision, there are " new heavens 
and a new earth." 



II. 



IS GOD GOOD ? 

A tendency to ask irreverent questions is 
no sign of strength. It is wholesome for us, 
in this day of facile defiance and hard accept- 
ance, to remember this. In an age which fails 
in deference, it is a healthful thing to do, to 
summon our spiritual instincts to order. The 
bust of young Augustus in the shop window 
wears a lung protector ; Clytie serves to ad- 
vertise the "Boston battery;" and positivist 
writers go out of their way to address Jeho- 
vah by the familiar pronoun " you." We 
have not passed the period when skepticism is 
more apt than not to be regarded as a proof 
of superior intelligence, but we have reached 
the stage at which no intelligent mind can 
thus regard it, without severe and honest 
study of its own motives. It is a lesson as 
old as Aristotle that philosophy is not the art 
of doubting, but the art of doubting well. 



IS GOD GOOD? 



33 



While the inclination to irreverence, let us 
repeat, is no indication of mental robustness, 
the courage to question accepted doctrine may 
be not only a proof of devoutness, but the 
condition of the profoundest submission to 
truth. 

This recognition of the inherent right of 
every man to have the reasons for what he be- 
lieves, and to shake his destiny by the shoul- 
ders till he gets such reasons, is postulated to- 
day, in educated thought. 

It is hardly necessary to say that it will not 
be the presumptuous object of this paper to try 
to settle in half a dozen pages that problem 
which is now the acknowledged centre of phil- 
osophical divergence : Given the universe, to 
find a Creator. " It takes me forty lectures," 
said a professional metaphysician, "to prove 
the personality of God." Such things must 
be. God is none the worse for it, or man, 
either, perhaps. The pulse will go throbbing ; 
the blood will have its bound, through the cut 
flesh its escape. But even for the terrible pro- 
test of the wound there is the reply of the liga- 
ture ; and behind the beat and fever the mag- 
nificent action of the hidden heart goes on to 



34 



IS GOB GOODf 



save the mutilated life. We do not make a 
gloomy prognosis of the case, but, meanwhile, 
prefer to surrender ourselves to the profound 
and sublime argument of hope. We desire 
to be understood as intelligently contented to 
observe that design does not exist without 
a designer ; that moral nature implies moral 
government ; that moral government means a 
moral governor ; that human conscience be- 
speaks a greater than human regulator; that 
aspiration involves an ideal, purity a model, 
the child a father, man God. We desire to be 
ranked among those simple souls who believe 
that this world never got where it is without 
somebody to put it here. In short, we find it, 
of the two difficulties, so much harder to ex- 
plain the nature of things without God than 
with him that we decline at present to perceive 
that he is no longer needed in our affairs. 
Just before the American civil war, a new re- 
ligion, it is said, arose among the negro slaves, 
founded upon the theory that God was dead. 
Much of our haste to dispense with him can 
boast no sounder premises. " I am a priest," 
said Victor Hugo's Cimourdain ; " no matter, 
I believe in God." " God has gone out of 



IS GOD GOOD? 



35 



date," said Danton. " I believe in God," 
said Cimourdain, unmoved. 

So much being understood, we may proceed 
to remind ourselves that the mere fact of hav- 
ing a God is of slight value to us unless we 
know what kind of a God he is. 

The benevolence of the Creator, it is pafe to 
assert, was never so thoughtfully questioned by 
such numbers of human beings as it is to-day. 
Openly or tacitly, this is done on every side of 
us. Falsely or fairly, many types of mind 
spring easily to this attitude. In hope or in 
despair, the awful query works out its fixed 
reply, and life freezes or melts to the mould of 
it. We should remember that this is so. 
The piercing cry of the people in Bichter's 
Dream reechoes about us : "0 Christ ! Are 
we all orphans ? " Spiritual tragedies are en- 
acting among us, to which none but an unim- 
aginative, unobservant, or un tender eye can be 
blind. Spiritual forms and forces which our 
fathers knew not, pursue us like unlaid ghosts. 
They start in the glamour of the drawing- 
room ; they skulk behind the study chair ; 
they hold the Prayer Book with trembling fin- 
gers ; they kneel with the worshiper ; they cry 



36 



IS GOD GOOD? 



in the hymn ; they stare above our bridals ; 
they look at us in the eyes of our children ; 
they regard us in the last recognition of our 
dying ; they huddle over our graves. To 
ignore them gives them a fatal fertility ; to 
foster them is death ; to feel out a true 
course among them is a " strait and narrow 
way." He who does this with intelligence 
and candor has to the respect of the unbe- 
liever a right as clear as the right of the 
chemist to be followed in the results of his ex- 
periment. He who does this with humility 
and prayer has to the confidence of untroubled 
believers a right as clear as the ecstasy of an 
aged saint at the communion table. 

There is no reason, in the nature of things, 
why a man should not question the benevo- 
lence of God. This may be done as honestly 
(I do not say as intelligently), and it may be 
done as honorably, as to question the good- 
nature of the Czar, or the poetic rank of Mil- 
ton, or the disposition of any other being supe- 
rior to the questioner. 

God is an unknown force. He is expressed 
to us through facts. It is our right to inter- 
pret the nature of that force through these 



IS GOD GOOD? 



37 



facts. It is our duty to exercise this right in 
a manner worthy of a right so solemn, of facts 
so grave, of a force so vast. 

Human impressions are of a singularly lim- 
ited reliability, but if there is one which can 
be said to be trustworthy, it is that people 
know when they suffer. In the infinitely com- 
plicated system of pain and pleasure that gov- 
erns this world we find, I premise, the em- 
phatic predominance of pain. Did we not re- 
member that there have been great teachers 
who deny (as there are those who admit) this, 
and that they have found important and noble 
disciples, we might presume that none but a 
shallow or selfish nature could fail to be aware 
of this predominance. 

There are two ways of viewing such a sys- 
tem. It is natural to be chiefly struck with 
the sadness of it. It is possible to be chiefly 
moved by the error in it. It is thought by 
many people — the world contains no better — 
that the latter is the natural, as it should be 
the habitual, avenue by which an upright in- 
telligence ought to approach the facts of life. 
This I doubt. It seems to me rather that 
it is mainly by its perception of pain that a 



38 



IS GOD GOOD? 



limited or created nature can constitute itself 
the appraiser of blame ; and that precisely in 
proportion to the purity of a soul must the 
misery of a sight appeal in advance of the 
guilt of it. " I want," said the villain, in a 
thoughtful story, to the unsuccessful clergy- 
man, who was opening his Testament upon 
him, — "I want to talk with a man whose 
first impulses are always warm towards the 
worst of men. Your best thoughts seem to 
be your second thoughts." "Do you know 
what keeps the gin palaces open ? " cried the 
pure and consecrated Robertson. " Misery ! 
The miserable go there to forget." 

I should wish, however, to add that I believe 
so thoroughly in the reality of what we call 
sin, that I shall have nothing to say of it here 
as a disconnected fact in the human economy, 
but, in speaking of the miseries of life, shall 
class it, first and finally, as the greatest hu- 
man misery that we know anything about. 

There will be readers of an essay like this to 
whom it will seem that the uncandidness of 
unnecessary gloom pervades it, and that the 
distresses of life, upon which it is always pos- 
sible to look from at least two sides, are pre- 



IS GOB GOOD f 



39 



sented with unfair emphasis. Be it said, once 
for all, that the writer is not unaware of the 
absence from this discussion of certain genial 
aspects of the world's mystery, nor of the 
sliohtness with which others are brought for- 
ward. It is my intention, at this time, to leave 
the task of urging these aspects to other 
hands. We are perhaps all of us more famil- 
iar with their force than with that of argument 
wrested from the reluctance of fate. Let it be 
ours, just now, to see what can be said for hu- 
man life upon its darkest side. Let us look, 
for once, at the divine, as we often do at the 
human problem, and, taking things at their 
worst, see what our chances are. We do this, 
in the one case, for good cheer's sake. For 
good cheer's sake I ask to be trusted in say- 
ing we may do it in the other, too. 

Further, I urge, especially, that we owe it to 
our faith to make it less easy than it is for 
shrewd atheists to say, " Those who believe in 
a God of love must close their eyes to the phe- 
nomena of life, or garble the universe to suit 
their theory" 

It not being our object to furnish a full 
index, or even a concordance, to the miseries 



40 



IS GOD GOOD? 



of mankind, I have selected only three ave- 
nues, from which, with merciful brevity, to 
approach our problem. 

Let us review for a moment our impressions 
of the Creator, as received through the mani- 
festations of natural law. 

Nature is orderly, wise, beautiful, mys- 
terious, terrible, remorseless, cruel. Surrender 
yourself to her awful moods. Test her at her 
tenderest. Try her at her strongest. Shall 
we bask in her midsummer sun ? It is a fire 
from which we must guard ourselves as if 
from the very glory of an offended God. 
Would we have the iron of her snows in our 
blood ? It is at our peril that they do not 
pierce our hearts. If the eternal resurrection 
of her spring does not pour freshets on our 
homes and mildew on our seeds, we kneel to 
thank her. If the red flags of her autumn 
wave no signals of disease or death about our 
firesides, we draw our held breath for another 
cycle of her seasons, and trust her still. She 
bestows the harvest at the chances of the 
famine. She gives her shine on condition of 
her storm. She blazons with beauty the hea- 
vens in which the bolt lurks to strike us down. 



IS GOD GOOD? 



41 



She stimulates our courage by her seas. She 
forms our fortitude by her deserts. She cre- 
ates our nations by her mountains. The ava- 
lanche, the shipwreck, and the sirocco are the 
cost. Behind every blessing she hides its 
penalty. Beneath every faculty of mind and 
body she secures its denial. Every bestowal 
is a danger. Acceptance measures bereave- 
ment. Possession is the gauge of loss. 

" Life," says a " scientific " historian, " is 
one long tragedy ; creation is one great 
crime." 

The holder of happier faiths must at least 
confess that the mass of evidence, in the great 
trial of Nature before the bar of man, is vo- 
luminous and stern. Forever the temperament 
will select for itself, and certain points in the 
case will intensify the prcejudicia with which 
each of us comes to the hearing. There are 
some minds for which the gentlest caprice of 
the accused can never blot the memory of 
sternly isolated facts in her history. There 
are nicely poised perceptions to which the 
dark corners of her past are always unveiled. 
There are tenderly balanced sympathies for 
which no personal immunity from infliction 



42 



IS GOD GOOD? 



can muffle the wail of recorded anguish. It is 
probably through a small, finely varied, and 
strictly characteristic collection of illustrations 
that each of us practically views a subject like 
this. Is Nature merciful ? It may be natural 
for you to give the historic answer, — to turn 
to ages when the world existed only for the 
propagation of monstrous animal growths, 
that breed, attack, rend each other, die, and 
give place to the next phase of apparently 
purposeless suffering. You recall primitive 
man, who dwelt in caves, like cubs ; who was 
without intelligible speech or human sym- 
pathy, or the decency of any wild beast known 
to the observation of science. Or you think 
of the highly develoj)ed savage, whose lan- 
guage resembled the hissing of serpents ; or of 
him, still ascending in the type, who fed upon 
the quivering flesh of live elephants, cultivated 
what is known as tribal marriage, and buried 
his dead with awful laughter ; or of him whose 
war-phrase, being interpreted, signifies, " Let 
us go and eat that nation." Or you point to 
cities that confide in a crater, and in an hour 
are seething into lava, like the inorganic rock ; 
or to those waste places where famine has 



IS GOD GOOD? 



43 



preceded the traveler, and where the starved 
corpses of entirely vanished communities offer 
him their gaunt hospitality. 

Is Nature merciful ? It may be that your 
impulse gives the poetic answer. You turn 
the query over to the tiger in the jungles, the 
death within the fruit, the venom in the 
thicket, the poison in the flower, the wreck 
beneath the sea, the plague upon the air. To 
many readers and lovers of Frederick Robert- 
son his awful illustration of the ichneumon fly 
will stand apart in their minds, and reply for 
them with the convincing vividness by which 
single images fasten themselves upon a sen- 
sitive absorption of truth too painful to be 
endured in full. 

The celebrated arraignment of the " great 
mother " by Stuart Mill will be well remem- 
bered : — 

" Nature impales men, breaks them as if on 
the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild 
beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with 
stones like the first Christian martyrs, starves 
them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poi- 
sons them by the quick or slow venom of her 
exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous 



44 



IS GOD GOOD? 



deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty 
of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. 
All this Nature does with the most supercilious 
disregard both of mercy and of justice, empty- 
ing her shafts upon the best and noblest in- 
differently with the meanest and the worst ; 
. . . often as the direct consequences of the 
noblest acts, and it might almost be imagined 
as a punishment for them." 

Is Nature merciful? It may be easy for 
you to proffer the judicial reply. You re- 
member her immense and kindly recuperative 
force : that the grass grows over her extinct 
volcano, that the harvest follows the furrow or 
the freshet, that the agitation of her oceans 
creates her temperature, that gorgeous beauty 
crowns the terrors of her tropics, that the 
snow protects the seed, that time restores the 
ruin of her cyclones, that flowers seek her 
graves, that death itself preserves her from 
the asphyxia of her superfluous life. You 
recall the exquisite system of development by 
which she is manifested to human knowledge ; 
you observe that ages of animal pleasure and 
pain went to the preparation of the globe for 
the habitation of rudimentary races, that in 



IS GOD GOOD? 



45 



their turn peopled the earth and perished from 
it to make way for men who could master it, 
who also yielded to others who had the mas- 
tery of them, who have themselves vanished 
before our blossoming civilization, as ours 
shall vanish before the symmetry of the future 
form. You have been taught by faith, as you 
are taught over again to-day by science, that 
the world is steadily becoming a better place 
to live in ; that the sum of its happiness 
absolutely increases ; and that the " sacrifice 
consumed," the cost at which the glory of the 
future shall be reached, has been what we are 
accustomed to call " worth while." 

Nevertheless, is Nature merciful ? Let us 
be just to her; but for myself, whenever I 
hear those three words, three things present 
themselves to my imagination, — the pant of 
a hunted hare, the look in the eye of a lost 
dog, and the heart of a woman towards a man 
who would betray her. 

Is Nature merciful ? The intellect of a 
child can accuse her. Goethe at an infant 
age did as much. The subtlety of a seer can- 
not defend her. Wordsworth would have 
done it, if any man could. The abj-ss of her 
harshness is deeper than Eydal Lake. 



46 



IS GOD GOOD? 



Take, again, — it is not an abrupt transi- 
tion, — our views o£ the Great Designer as 
affected by the relation of the sexes. This is 
a subject upon which words must be few, but 
impressions deep. It is a commonplace to 
say that nothing contributes so far to either 
the happiness or the misery of the race as this 
sole incident in its development. 

From the Abyssinian bride sold by her hus- 
band for a weapon, an ornament, a dinner, to 
the last victim of a mariage de convenance 
in civilized life, what a sealed and awful 
book ! From the heart of Dante, of Abelard, 
of Vittoria Colonna, to the blush of the little 
lass betrothed in a country lane last week, 
what a range of capacity for what is called 
joy ! I scarcely hesitate before saying that 
the attraction between man and woman cannot 
be presumed to have added to the delight, in 
proportion as it has intensified the denial, of 
existence. We may be quite willing to in- 
trust this assertion to the happiest lover in the 
world, provided his happiness be of that sen- 
sitive sort which does not shut out the appre- 
hension of other people's deprivation. Since, 
were he not the most sensitive, he could not 



IS GOD GOOD? 



47 



be the happiest ; and were he the most sensi- 
tive, he would be the most sympathetic. It 
would be almost enough, in this connection, to 
suggest the inherent vagrancy of the affec- 
tional instinct in man, and the historic con- 
stancy of woman. What ingenuity could 
surpass that involved in this one exquisite in- 
vention of actual or possible anguish ? 

It would be almost enough to take one ab- 
solute look at the heart of an honorable man 
who, in an hour of beautiful delusion, has 
wedded an insincere woman. 

It would be almost enough to shut the eyes 
before the conflicts of a pure heart, to which 
the supreme attraction occurs, when every law 
of God or man has welded it to the claim of 
the less. 

It would be almost enough to look into the 
face of a drunkard's wife. 

It would be more than enough to hear the 
cry of the deserted girl, who leaped to a death 
more merciful at its worst than life at its best 
to her. 

It would be unjust not to recall the heavy 
pressure of happiness against the scale of the 
question, involved in pure betrothals, bridal 



48 



IS GOD GOOD? 



hours, assured domestic content, the experi- 
ence of tried and calm affections, the bliss of 
young parents, the rejuvenation of age in its 
offspring, and the repose of those for whom 
the prayer of Tobit has been answered : 
" Mercifully grant that we may grow aged to- 
gether." 

But it would be illogical not to observe the 
intricate insecurity of the happiest hour that 
history could be shown to have given to the 
most fortunate affections of the race. It would 
be almost enough to watch the countenance of 
the radiant young mother, who, her children 
leaning about her, at her fireside, hears sud- 
denly grating upon their laughter the discord- 
ant sound of a croupy cough. 

It would be almost enough to stand with 
the father of motherless babes by the first 
gash life has ever cut in the churchyard turf 
for him. 

It would be almost enough to avert the face 
from a meeting between pure parents and a 
ruined son. 

It would be almost enough to remember the 
mystery of womanhood, so " heavily weighted, 
in the race of life," as a great scientist of our 
day expresses it, by maternity. 



IS GOD GOOD? 



49 



It would be almost enough to follow the red 
feet of war to the obscure life of one widowed 
girl. 

It would be enough to watch the process of 
descent by which a betrothal ever reaches a 
divorce. 

Look once more at our impressions of their 
First Cause as received from the sufferings 
of the lower classes of society. These are 
" facts " before which the wisest, the ten- 
derest, the healthiest, the most joyous, and the 
most devout among us may well wish for the 
wings of the seraphim in the sacred story ; of 
whom it is said that " with twain they covered 
their faces, and with twain they covered their 
feet, and with twain they did fly." 

A miniature bast of Michael Angelo's Slave 
stands as a paper-weight upon the MS. which 
this pen is tracing. The pose of the muti- 
lated head, the droop of the swollen eyelids, 
the quiver of the pitiful mouth, the protest of 
the thoughtful brow, present themselves, so 
many mute arguments, appealing to be used. 
The bit of plaster is an unanswered accusa- 
tion. It bewails the mystery of human cap- 
tivity, of which the enslaving of man by man 



50 



IS GOD GOOD? 



was the rudest form, as the ministration of one 
portion of the race to-day to the leisure of the 
other is the most lenient. From the first cap- 
tive mother condemned to murder her own 
child, to the last poor wretch who sold her soul 
to buy bread for her family ; from the slave at 
the galley-oar, in the seraglio, under the lash, 
facing the blood-hound, on the auction-block ; 
to the factory-girl with the " cotton-cough," 
the miner in the fire - damp, the poisoned 
" hand " in the lead-works, or the child of 
four years rolling cigars for a passionate or 
drunken overseer, — there is a range of sheer 
human fear, which it is not easy to contem- 
plate either with or without an explanation 
of its existence. 

From the filthy shiverers who shared the 
straw of the feudal hovel with their donkey or 
their goat, to the Irish laborer evicted at mid- 
winter from the home of his life-time ; from 
the temperate and diligent American family 
found to have lived for three months on bread 
and water, to the all too real " little Joe " of 
Dickens, or the " abused child " in any of 
our Christian cities, habituated to sufferings 
which it would blot this page to repeat ; from 



IS GOD GOOD? 



51 



the poor woman who told Octavia Hill that 
she chose her deadly cellar because " it lay 
between ninepence and the sun " to the six 
hundred and twenty-three descendants of an 
ignorant girl, now famous and infamous to 
social science as u Pauper Margaret ; " from 
the great causes of the English corn-law re- 
sistance, or the Reign of Terror, to the Nihilist 
passion fermenting beneath the Winter Palace, 
or the New York tenement house (sinister 
forerunner of revolution !), where four fam- 
ilies occupy one room, and wherein, by math- 
ematical estimate, there belongs to each living 
being under the roof a space on the floor's sur- 
face measuring eight feet by four, — there is 
a margin for simple human endurance, upon 
which it is not agreeable, either with or with- 
out its obverse relief, to dwell. 

On this obverse, it were uncandid not to re- 
member, are pale and pleasant compensations 
to benignant thought. Beyond a certain point, 
deprivation unquestionably dulls susceptibil- 
ity, denial teaches endurance, obscurity pre- 
serves from responsibility, the transient plea- 
sure is more emphatic, the finer foreboding 
perhaps less acute, aspiration cools into ac- 
ceptance, and ignorance stratifies into repose. 



52 



IS GOD GOOD? 



It is not a grateful task to remind people 
how unfortunate they are. One who seems 
to undertake it must expect to be accused of 
pessimism (chiefly by those persons who can- 
not be said, even for politeness' sake, to 
know what a pessimist is), and of " morbid- 
ness," — a word which apparently has been 
made to cover whatever form of viewing fact 
differs from one's own. " Of course," said a 
great writer of his own sad, honest look at 
life, — " of course it is exaggerated to those 
who feel feebly." " Let no man counsel me," 
said Sophocles, " but who has felt sorrow like 
mine." Nevertheless, it must be repeated that 
no consistent philosophy, no trained imagina- 
tion, no instructed memory, no sensitive sym- 
pathy, and no intelligent religious trust can 
deny this to be a state of manifold, mysterious, 
and unmeasured suffering. It is a doctrine 
no newer than Plato that all our pleasure con- 
sists in an escape from pain. 

The very failure of the pen in a space so 
small, before a subject so enormous, writes 
deeper and darker than its fluency could 
mark. The very sinking of the heart before 
a strain so tense upon its nerve ; the very 



IS GOD GOOD? 



53 



impulse which leads two kinds of people, the 
dull and the fortunate — or, we might acid a 
third, the cold — into their clamor about the 
beauty and haj)piness of the world, itself ac- 
centuates the great onrolling sound of the 
truth, like the voices of children on the shore, 
which increase while they defy the roar of the 
breaker. 

It will be remembered that we have touched 
with a reticent and sparing finger upon what 
might be called three key-notes in the great 
discords of life : the cruelty of nature, the 
mystery of sex, and the misery of the poor. 
It will be seen that these present but a por- 
tion of the lost harmonies around which the 
chords of human suffering clash. It will be 
observed that of the great facts of heredity we 
have said nothing at all ; that to the immense 
influence of physical disease on happiness we 
have scarcely alluded ; that we have passed 
by all those finer phases of our question which 
have led metaphysicians to maintain that life 
is a continual vacillation between displeasure 
and ennui ; that we have omitted the acute 
historical illustrations of human woe ; that we 
have avoided the whole train of thought sug- 



54 



JS GOD GOOD? 



gested by institutions of charity, penalty, and 
mental healing ; that we have not dwelt upon 
the obstinate argument of suicide ; that we 
have not considered the terrible phenomena of 
remorse ; that we have not brooded upon the 
pitiless and inexorable sentence of death which 
has gone out against every breathing creature 
on the earth. It will be acknowledged that we 
have spared ourselves in the task of " looking 
the worst in the face." 

The most irrecoverable " blue " in philoso- 
phy could not venture to overlook the sum of 
the world's enjoyment, if only for the mathe- 
matical reason that a given amount of it repre- 
sents so much less weight than the same amount 
of misery. The colors of lakes, the scents of 
blush roses, — who could forget ? — are ever 
with us. The radiance of lovers' eyes and the 
laughter of children we may not miss. The 
comforts of ease and the vagaries of wealth 
are present to us, and though the invalid poor 
die for lack of beef tea, it is a fixed fact that a 
velvet suit for a doll can be purchased to-day 
for fifteen dollars. But it should not be for- 
gotten that, so far as we are able judicially to 
estimate questions affecting our emotions, pain 



18 GOD GOOD? 



55 



" goes farther," as our idiom has it, in this 
world than pleasure. This the great inductive 
philosopher, experience, teaches, at least to the 
more sensitive of the species, early in life. 

Up to a certain degree, pain passes over 
the suffering cells of the brain without dis- 
integrating them ; but there comes a limit, as 
clear to the individual consciousness as it is 
difficult to make over to that of another, be- 
yond which the best that fate could offer could 
not atone for the worst she has inflicted. Wise 
men may dispute this nice point to the world's 
end. It would be possible to select one be- 
reaved mother, who might call them all as 
scholars to her feet. A great sufferer knoivs 
that he can set single hours of his life against 
the accumulated happiness of its years. He 
knows that the one, considered in its cold, in- 
tellectual character as a fact of consciousness, 
outweighs the other, sinking as far below it as 
the sod is from the stars. This knowledge is 
no more to be taken from him than his soul. 
He would go to the bar of God with it. 

There is yet another thing, which the gayest 
optimist of us all would do well, in a discus- 
sion like this, to bear in mind. The charm of 



56 



IS GOD GOOD? 



nature, the glory of love, and the pride of life 
are facts of which a Creator, presumably not 
kindly inclined towards his creatures, would 
be presumptively sure to avail himself. He 
would not be a very shrewd Deity who, with 
malevolent intentions, should create a world of 
ugliness, hate, and unmitigated deprivation. 

Such a God would be too wise to construct 
a system of unrelieved woe. He would exult- 
antly deepen pain by a background of plea- 
sure. He would fiendishly emphasize loss by 
experience of possession. He would create 
hope as a foil against despair. The color of 
the lily, the kiss of a child, the delirium of 
love, it might be his horrible ingenuity to hold 
as what artists call " values" against the tor- 
nado, and the tooth of famine and the grave. 

Conceptions like these, almost enough to 
congest imagination, might be true, though 
not in the same measure, of the moral nature 
of man. It is conceivable that up to a cer- 
tain extent, at least, good impulses might have 
been created for evil ends. There is a large 
border-land of moral conflict, wherein our 
worst assaults seem to come on the wings 
of angels of light. It is conceivable that a 



IS GOD GOOD? 



57 



maleficent God would bestow upon us aspira- 
tion to create in us remorse, and allow us to 
strive for purity that he might the more ex- 
quisitely gloat over our surrender to guilt. 

It is not easy for a reverent mind to glance 
into this pit, even to heighten by contrast the 
dazzle of the ether up to which the devout 
heart looks. 

But it seems to me that if there is any be- 
ing of whom we need to know the worst that 
could be said, our Creator is that Being. A 
faith that will not bear for once firmly to re- 
gard the blackest possibilities of our destiny 
does not deserve their brightest. 

For the reasons given, as well as for those 
which must be omitted from a study of this 
kind, the reader will follow me in saying that 
the miseries and mysteries of human life being 
what they are, and our conceptions of the Crea- 
tor being, as they must be, drawn to so large an 
extent through misery and mystery, the simple 
fact of the faith of mankind in his fair inten- 
tions is in and of itself as powerful a proof of 
his goodwill as we are likely to obtain, — a far 
more powerful one than all the limp religious 
impulse that could be wrung out of a system in 



58 



IS GOD GOOD? 



which ease and pleasure predominated. It 
does not seem to me that we are in the habit of 
giving to this aspect of the question anything 
like the dignity or the force which, as an argu- 
ment, it deserves. 

I do not refer to what is known as the intui- 
tive argument for God, which lies quite behind 
us in the discussion. Let us call this rather 
the argument of acquired trust. It would 
seem to be the consequence of experience 
rather than its prelude. The child, in the 
first blow from a father's hand, perceives noth- 
ing but an evidence of cruelty. Youth, hot- 
headed and quick-hearted, upon the first im- 
portant occasion when its wishes are crossed, 
flashes out its protest against Providence. 
Maturity only builds up confidence, and old 
age alone knows peace. 

We find it to be the law of divine denial 
that it not only does not obliterate, it creates, 
the phenomenon of human belief. The final 
test of love is trust under apparent desertion. 
This absolute trial it has been God's mysteri- 
ous purpose to impose upon man. Man has 
stood the test. Deep as he wades in the tide 
of error, wide as he gropes in the gloom of 



IS GOD GOOD? 



59 



doubt, low as he sinks in the mud of sin, nev- 
ertheless, man has stood the test. 

There are lives of which we say, in the un- 
conscious bitterness of common speech, that 
they are " pursued by Providence." The re- 
ligious resignation of such lives partakes of 
the nature of miracle. Our wildest outcry 
against fate goes down before the patience of 
the deaf-mute or the cheerfulness of the blind, 
or the trust of an invalid, buried alive for forty 
years in a " mattress grave," in the tenderness 
of the Power that fixed him there. 

When life selects a sensitive and silent and 
untaught woman, whose whole being beyond 
its affectional side is rudimentary, of whom we 
should say that it were a severity to expect her 
to breast a snow-storm alone, — when fate se- 
lects such a woman, and bruises her stroke by 
stroke, leaving her widowed, leaving her child- 
less, dragging her through the extremes of 
poverty, adding sickness, inventing friendless- 
ness, threatening insanity, and denying death, 
and we find her peacefully and affectionately 
on her knees before a Being whom she never 
saw, whom she never heard, whom she never 
touched, but to whom alone she can attribute 



60 



IS GOD GOOD? 



the inquisition of her life, — let us drop upon 
our own, beside her ; there is no higher place 
that our nicest logic is fit for, before the argu- 
ment of such a fact as she. 

Life presents too many illustrations of this 
miracle of human trust for us to be able to set 
them aside as exceptions. They form a serried 
rank, advancing upon our doubts like the 
armed angels whom the prophet saw in the 
golden air. It is not to our purpose now to 
dwell upon the extent to which Christianity 
has cultivated this trust. It is enough at 
present that, from whatever origin and by 
whatever support, it exists. The fact that one 
sane mind, under the extremity of fate, de- 
veloped the habit of joyous confidence known 
to the higher forms of religious culture were 
something before which a doubter with a fine 
eye must ponder long. 

It would seem that the fact that life abounds, 
has always abounded, with this confidence, 
rises, as I have said, to the region of the su- 
pernatural. It is less human than divine. It 
assures us of the divine in our Maker by 
the divine in ourselves. It is the fire of 
heaven — Prometheus never knew it — given 
at last to man. 



IS GOB GOOD? 



61 



What merely human friendship (I ask it 
reverently) could stand the strain which God 
has seen fit to put upon our friendship for 
himself ? 

What human affection increases under the 
infliction by its object of unexplained and life- 
long pain ? 

True, we know instances in which our little 
loves for one another seem to have survived 
every attack upon them, — that of the wife 
for a brutal husband, that of a mother for a 
heartless child ; but such is not the law of our 
natures. 

Faith requires faith. Tenderness demands 
the tender. Truth claims the true ; and ought 
to claim it, and will. Even in the rarest 
forms of self-abnegation known to human 
fondness, repeated signs of coldness or unkind- 
ness wear out trust. Trust is the last and 
highest manifestation of the divine. Even our 
conceivable malignant Deity would pause be- 
fore the creation of a state of character in 
which trust — trust in purity, trust in beauty, 
trust in love, trust in himself as the essence of 
these holy things — had become the all-per- 
vading and the all - powerful element ; im- 



62 



IS GOD GOOD? 



mediate as the light, and strong as the wind, 
and tender as tears, and firm as the eternal 
rock. He would have created a character 
mightier than himself. He would have cre- 
ated his own God. The hells, whether of time 
or eternity, could work no death upon such a 
character. It would pass out of them like the 
three men in the old story from the furnace of 
living fire. 

The ultimate religious tenderness of man 
towards God is a thing too high, too pure, 
too reasonable, to have sprung from any source 
less than himself. It must not be forgotten 
that this trust involves a state of feeling in 
man which puts the fact that he has hurt God 
to the front of his consciousness that God 
has hurt him. Even supposing it to be true 
that mere human longing for happiness, in 
itself considered, should not philosophically 
offer the promise of satisfaction, it is not ra- 
tional that the panting human thirst for holi- 
ness, implied in the whole scheme by which 
the confidence of mankind in the mercy of its 
Creator has been developed, should be the off- 
shoot of anything other than a God who de- 
served it. 



JS GOB GOOD? 



63 



Is it not conceivable that the creation of 
precisely such a type of character as this exact 
kind of trust signifies were worth the cost at 
which it has been built up ? 

Is it not altogether possible that the rounded 
development of such a character demands a 
far more straightforward look at the painful 
facts of life than we are taught to give them 
by that pseudo-philosophy which substitutes 
superficial cheerfulness for searching truthful- 
ness ? We are not asked to writhe ourselves 
into the belief that this is a happy world. We 
are asked peacefully to admit that it was not 
meant to be a happy one. We are not lured, 
like girls, to love our Creator because he treats 
us indulgently. We are expected, like sol- 
diers, to love him, although he treats us 
sternly. We are required to discover the 
characteristics of a loving and faithful parent 
in the appearance of a severe and mysterious 
ruler. 

It is the human task 

To find the father's smile 

Behind the monarch's mask. 

Regarded carefully, this is a fine tribute of 
respect to the race. 



64 



IS GOB GOOD? 



It must not be forgotten that the scientific 
basis of human trust in the Creator is one of 
belief in a life to succeed this. 

This is as much as to say that pain is more 
formative than pleasure of spiritual character, 
and of faith which is the distinct resultant 
of such character. 

On the whole, for most of us this is prac- 
tically true. They are rare people who can 
bear great good-fortune. Sustained happiness, 
as our phrase goes, spoils us ; only the select 
natures sweeten, strengthen, and mature under 
it. There seems to be a law, not unlike cer- 
tain analogies in nature, by which the human 
plant requires a winter. 

Philosophically, too, it is easy to see that 
pain rather than joy leads to that desire for 
another life which might underlie the capacity 
for one. " A soul sodden with pleasures " 
does not soar. A continuance of limited hap- 
piness is no spur towards the attainment of 
the unlimited. All social history proves this. 
Man unstung by deprivation saunters through 
his little possibility. The ascetic conqueror 
succumbs to the luxurious vices of the con- 
quered. He who lives under a bread-fruit 



IS GOD GOOD? 



65 



tree invents no grain-elevators. Very near the 
surface lies at least one sound reason why the 
race finds itself in what Kant called a " never- 
ceasing pain." This opens close upon all the 
ancient and great discussions clustering about 
the value of force and activity. It is enough 
for our purposes to say that it is natural to 
accept pleasure ; it is natural to escape pain. 
If this world had been made for the many 
what it is for the few, given to the deprived 
as it is to the fortunate ; if life for any of us 
had been what its ideals are, what but a mir- 
acle could have given us a compelling interest 
in a world beyond ? In short, if we had been 
provided with the materials of content, where 
should we have found the materials of aspira- 
tion ? 

Modern science has itself unwittingly in- 
vented one of the best of testimonies to the 
benevolence, if not the beneficence, of the Cre- 
ator, in acknowledging the compulsion which 
it has found laid upon itself of evolving 
human happiness out of human suffering. 
Somewhere, keen eyes have perceived, a keen 
intellect must meet this demand. Somehow, 
it must be done. Whatever this globe was 



66 



IS GOD GOODf 



put here for, it was not for failure. What- 
ever the unit was made for, the race was not 
made for hopelessness. However black the 
past, however blind the present, a bright 
future is a philosophical necessity. 

The individual, we are told, withers and 
dies. The type roots and renews. The blood- 
red pages of history, closed, sealed, and for- 
gotten, give way to the fair hieroglyphs of 
prophecy, cold, golden, and calm. Let us be 
content to suffer, that our posterity may 
enjoy. Let us be satisfied with our dulled ca- 
pacity, our imperfect faculty, our little know- 
ledge, our lost ideal, our pitiful hope, our puny 
achievement, since they who come after us 
shall grow like grass from our decay. Let us 
endure, enjoy, strive, sing, bleed, smile, and 
go to our graves gratefully. Over our dumb 
and witless ashes a select and proud race, with 
the beauty of pagan gods, shall walk haughtily, 
and with the scorn of the gods shall remember 
us as we remember the savage, whose war- 
shouts assisted in developing the fine, human 
larynx, to contribute to the modulations in the 
voice of Malibran. 

It is significant that temperaments easily 



IS GOD GOOD? 



67 



appeased by the best that unbelieving science 
has to offer have been compelled to devise 
what, for want of a better term, we may call 
a humane purpose in the creation of this 
world. Clumsily as they have succeeded, it is 
not we who should overlook the fact that they 
have tried. It is memorable that they have 
been forced to tender even this pitiful substi- 
tute for personal immortality ; nay, they have 
added the " invention of immortality," what- 
ever that may mean, to the list of attractions 
held out to the disciples of their meagre faith. 
It is important that even so awkward a con- 
trivance is presented to us in place of the per- 
fect mechanism of eternal hope. Natural se- 
lection has not yet eliminated the quiver from 
the human lip, which makes it hard to frame 
the imaginary answer that Strauss makes to 
Frederick the Great : " Pardon, sire, but I 
have no desire to go to heaven at all." 

Human trust, we observed, in divine mercy 
is postulated on belief in a life to come. * This 
is also to say that the disadvantages of this life 
are so many arguments for the evolution from 
it of another ; properly presented, an unassail- 
able position, which this is no place to elabo- 
rate. 



68 



IS GOD GOOD? 



The mourner smiles, because she looks 
forward to comfort. The sufferer endures, 
because he expects relief. The imperfectly 
happy yearns for the maturity of joy. The 
guilty hopes, because he anticipates purity. 
Each confides in a Being who is both able and 
willing to bestow these sequels on pleasure, 
pain, and sin. 

It is the aim of the believer to cultivate this 
confidence as the most important fact of his 
life. It is more real to him than his sorrow ; 
it is more near to him than his remorse. Fa- 
miliarity cannot wrest it from him. Unlooked- 
for anguish cannot shock it out of him. The 
hurling of temptation upon temptation cannot 
weaken it in him. Death cannot bury it with 
him. Eternity shall justify it for him. 

Is God good ? If this sublime trust, itself 
a marvel only less than himself, be the fond 
and fatal delusion of a pitiful ignorance, a 
phantasm of the emotions, a movement of the 
blood, a secretion of the brain, no. iVo, if the 
bravest delights this earth can muster are all 
that men can confidently call their own. iVb, 
if the sum of our misery is the sum of our 
days. iVo, if the tale of earth's error is " the 
end of the song." 



JS GOD GOOD? 



69 



If joy has no permanence, if anguish no 
comfort, if sin no cure, no, and a thousand 
times no ! 

If aspiration has no perfect blossom, if 
power no mellow fruit, if hope no sound justi- 
fication ; if denial never becomes delight ; if 
despair never turns to ecstasy ; if love knows 
no resurrection, and purity no assured vitality, 
and faith no throne, no, — to the last breath, 
no ! 

Is there Love at the heart of the world ? Is 
there law in this Love ? Is there joy in this 
law? Yes, if the blighted seed of our experi- 
ence be sown to the blessed harvest of another. 
Yes, if time be a cipher to which eternity 
gives the key. Yes, if the virile hope of a life 
without an end be the measure of the mystery 
of the splendor of the truth. Yes, if he who 
permitted this world has promised the other. 
Yes, at the strain of extremity, in the black- 
ness of darkness, to the last outcry of endur- 
ance and the last throb of belief, — yes ! 

O you who have given us a counterfeit of hu- 
man hope, who have stuffed an effigy of human 
happiness, who have composed a parody on 
human dignity, we suffer you, without fear, to 



70 



IS GOD GOOD? 



set these against the gold, the heart-beat, and 
the song ! What is the best your first can 
offer, beside the least our lowest can com- 
mand ? What has the king, the priest, or the 
prophet of your dreary creed to look to, com- 
pared with the promise open to the obscurest 
human soul that knows itself a deathless thing ? 
"A cripple in the right way," Bacon has re- 
minded us, "may beat a racer in the wrong." 
A believing pauper would be insane to change 
places with him who may be your " advanced " 
Herbert Spencer of two thousand years to 
come, though that highly developed being were 
to be all that you expect, if he is to cease 
where you anticipate. A slave with a heaven 
were happier than Shakespeare without. 

We suffer you, without disturbance, to ex- 
plain to us how the physiology of the future is 
to extend the realm of matter, till it is coex- 
tensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with 
action ; to tell us of the prospect of that hea- 
venly commune, "in which men will reserve 
for themselves not even a hope, not even the 
shadow of a joy," — in which " all is at an end 
for the speck of flesh and blood with the little 
spark of instinct which it calls mind ; " to 



IS GOD GOOD? 



71 



call our attention to the growth of the " great 
unit," man, the sacrifice of generation for gen- 
eration, of the species for the type, of the frac- 
tion for the whole. One hour's hope of the 
believer's Paradise is worth it all. 

It is a well-mannered comfort that you offer 
us, like the smile of a woman in evening dress 
on a man who has an appointment with the 
surgeon. We recognize your courtesy, but 
we choose the warm clasp of a living human 
hand. 

Your cold voices have a hollow echo. They 
sound afar off, to us, and thin. Their clamor 
faints about our imperious human need. Who 
would exchange even the delusion of eternal 
life for the apotheosis of death ? 

If to expectance we add assurance, how can 
we pause for your bleak interruption ? 

Hope is not proof, but it is argument. Con- 
viction is not demonstration, but it is enlight- 
enment. " He had learned," it is said of 
Goethe, " that faith goes farther than know- 
ledge." 

How naturally the compass swings on its 
pivot to the pole ! How joyously the heart 
which has cultivated the spiritual faculty of 



72 



IS GOD GOOD? 



faith turns, from the obstacles thrust between 
the love of God and the love of man, to the 
region where these two elemental facts of the 
universe become one mighty current ! 

Astronomy tells us of systems lighted by 
colored suns, — green, sapphire, and ruby. 
From the lurid airs of a crimson world we 
seem to ourselves to return to the peace and 
the power of absolute and homelike light. 

" The love of God," said Ecclesiasticus, in a 
profound moment, " passeth all things for illu- 
mination." We recall, with a stir at the heart 
which transforms the severe philosophical lan- 
guage, what a great thinker has told us of "the 
absurdity of the passions and the littleness of 
all that is not God." We can understand 
Spinoza, of whom it is said that he was " intox- 
icated with God." The whole being bounds 
like the cripple at the Gate Beautiful, whom 
the apostle healed. Our eternal liberty draws 
its value from the prospect of acquaintance 
with him who is behind our mutilated life. 
Here is the secret of the high reticence of 
knowledge, never to be conquered, always to be 
sought. Here is the essence of all the solemn 
ideals of love, never overtaken, never possessed, 



IS GOD GOOD? 



73 



forever to be won. Here is the source of the 
white waters of purity, an eternal thirst for 
which demands, deserves, and shall receive an 
eternal supply. 

If everlasting hope be the possibility and the 
promise to the race, anything that the maker 
of an ephemeral system chooses to insert in 
it cannot philosophically be made a ground 
of complaint. " There can no evil befall a 
good man either in life or death," said Soc- 
rates, going to the root of the matter. " If I 
believed as you do," cried a doubter, looking 
at me with the uncomforted eyes of her class, 
"nothing would daunt me!" She was right, 
if only as a matter of pure algebra. " Omit 
eternity in your estimate of area," urged 
a mathematician, " and your conclusion is 
wrong." No equation can be constructed out 
of this and the eternal life. Limited pain 
cannot be set against illimitable happiness, 
nor transient stain against permanent purity. 
If heaven follows earth, man is dumb before 
God. 

How gentle thought grows in the climate of 
hope ! Seen in the atmosphere of trust, the 
countenance of life is changed. Re-read in the 



74 



IS GOD GOOD? 



light of love, the story of the world flashes into 
an illuminated text. 

The imagination learns to stir reticently 
about the details of the dreariest fate. The 
sympathy yearns more and more peacefully 
towards the woe which it cannot forget or re- 
lieve. The heart surrenders to mystery, and 
cultivates content. We wrest the habit of 
cheer from the teeth of denial. We educate 
the impulse of happiness, and fling challenges 
to grief. We dwell upon the little joys of life. 
We count the forgotten ease. We seek the 
" hid treasure." We remember the tempera- 
ments that grief passes by upon the other side, 
the lives which acute temptation shuns, mem- 
ories that naturally do not absorb the unplea- 
sant, hearts that are easily light. We recall 
the grave delights of a consciously forming 
character, the strength and fineness of the mil- 
itary quality that conflict only cultivates, the 
stern beauty of endurance, the high glow of 
self-sacrifice, the peace and power of prayer, 
the grandeur of hardly acquired holiness. We 
find ourselves unable to think of these things 
apart from their embryonic character. We 
remember that they develop deathless forces. 



IS GOD GOOD t 



75 



We remember that they go to constitute un- 
dying spirits. Pain viewed in the loftiness 
of its purpose does not seem to be the worst 
thing in the world. Idealized by heaven, earth 
stands transfigured. Life becomes a privilege, 
glorious in proportion as it is a test of trust-ca- 
pacity and enduring power. That mysterious 
quality which in its physical form physicians 
call vitality, and for which they cherish an al- 
most religious respect, has a spiritual counter- 
part, which we learn to recognize as the proud- 
est possession that a man can own. AH that 
he hath though he give for it, he will not count 
the cost. It is like one of those Chinese crys- 
tals, rounded by attrition with grains of sand, 
of which we are told that it takes the life-time 
of one workman to make a perfect specimen. 

An eye-witness of a peculiarly heart-rend- 
ing shipwreck once stood depicting to a circle 
of friends, with vitriolic vividness, the strug- 
gles of men who clung, in an icy sea, on a mid- 
winter day, five hours and a half to a glazed 
rock, at which the surf was tearing like the 
teeth of hate. A listener, lifting the half-mel- 
ancholy, half-scornful look of one who has 
weighed life and found it wanting, interrupted, 



76 



IS GOD GOOD? 



" Fools to cling ! Fools to cling ! " " No ! " 
flashed another, turning upon him with a 
movement which I know not how to describe 
as other than radiant ; it was like the sweep 
of light on darkness. " No ; while there was 
hope of life, philosophers to cling ! " 

Fools, then, or philosophers, — we are con- 
tent to leave the choice of terms to the great 
heart and sound sense of humanity, — we cling 
to the sane, strong, reasonable hope of ever- 
lasting life. 

The wave will have its roar. The breaker 
will overwhelm the sinking face. The hands 
may slip, bleed, freeze ; but they will cling. 

It is human to cling; it is divine to cling; it 
is instinct ; it is reason ; it is the blind brute 
motion of nature ; it is the last fine finish of 
knowledge. 

If there is a rock, though all but sunk be- 
neath the surf, a drowning hand will find it. 
Before the argument of life the negation of 
death sweeps on and seethes away, like a 
thwarted wave. 

Upon this rock, at the ebb of the tide, in 
the calm of the day, we leave the exigencies of 
fate. To it we bring the worst of dread, the 



18 GOD GOOD? 



77 



dreariest of doubt, the climax of pain, the fe- 
ver of sin. To it we take the promise of our 
imperfect joys, the blight of our unripe con- 
tent, the recoil of our rebuffed aspiration, the 
disturbance of our broken repose. From it we 
regard the unknown Author of mystery with 
the high beat of trustful hearts. Earth is a 
student in what the great Frenchwoman called 
" the science of God." Life is like the Tamil 
grammar, which reached the ideal of scholar- 
ship in its solemn preface : " To God, the eter- 
nal, almighty Jehovah, and author of speech, 
be glory forever and ever." 

It is hardly possible to close a paper like 
this without reminding ourselves once again, 
quite clearly, that with the remarkable con- 
formations of the Christian Scriptures towards 
our subject, it has not been our purpose to 
deal. But it can scarcely be overlooked that 
to believers in revealed truth it is difficult to 
perfect the separation of thought which we 
have selected. 

There is a powerful protest of the heart, 
which in asking, " Does my friend love me ? " 
insensibly slides into " What will he do for 
me?" or even into "What has he done for 



78 



IS GOD GOOD* 



me ? " Man, in his extremity, exerts his sol- 
emn right to carry this appeal of his nature 
reverently up. What will God do for him ? 
Everlasting life leans down to answer. What 
has God done for him? A Carpenter from 
Nazareth can reply. 



III. 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

The Bible above most, perhaps above all 
books that have been written, has tempera- 
ment. It piques, attracts, repels, confuses. 
It draws upon attention and patience. It 
disciplines negligence. It puts fine spurs to 
motive. One must take time to win the in- 
dividuality of it. It is a liberal education to 
learn how to live with it. 

The Bible is not a primer. It is no easy 
reading for beginners. The mere alphabet of 
either knowledge or feeling cannot fit a man to 
do anything better with this book than to take 
it or leave it on trust from his own moral in- 
stinct. " No man who knows nothing else," 
a scholar has told us, " knows even his Bible." 

The Bible, we say, is a difficult book. This 
should be admitted fairly, in justice to it, to 
belief, and to believers. It is a powerful ap- 
peal to the emotions, but it is more than that. 



80 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL ? 

It is a strenuous influence upon conduct, but 
it is yet different from that. It is a challenge 
to the intellect of the race. 

It is one of the signs of a successful book 
that the reader employs himself in thinking 
how he would have done it differently, and 
it would be a laughable problem in psycho- 
logical algebra to estimate the number and 
kinds of persons who would like to show the 
Creator how to write his over again. How 
many of us, in the deep below the lowest deep 
that underlies sub-consciousness, believe that 
we could have made a better Bible than we 
possess ? 

Students of the subject have drawn a dis- 
tinction familiar to most of us, between Reve- 
lation, Inspiration, and the Bible, but for con- 
venience the term Revelation is used in this 
paper in its commonly accepted sense, as de- 
scriptive of that especial form of divine mani- 
festation known to us as the Christian Scrip- 
tures. 

The moment that a man undertakes to judge 
what he would do if he were a God, he must, 
of necessity, put God in the position of doing 
as if he were a man; but so far as we can 



WHAT DOES REVELATION RE VEAL t 81 



assert what might, could, would, or should be 
possible to a supposed Creator in a case like 
this, we may say that, in extending such a rev- 
elation of his nature or purposes to us, God 
had two methods open to him. 

He might have selected the miraculous 
method. He might have inscribed truth upon 
the firmament, in eternal characters that the 
mind and eye of man should have been edu- 
cated to interpret. The stars of heaven might 
have composed his awful alphabet ; planet and 
comet and sun, nebula and meteor, might have 
formed and punctuated those mystical words ; 
each heavenly body might, without interfer- 
ence with its individual destiny or value, have 
been by a divine freak so blocked out as to 
contribute to the formation of the magnificent 
characters which were to enlighten this small 
and ignorant planet that we happen to call 
our own. At twilight, men might have stood 
to watch the splendor of these hieroglyphs 
deepen down into the night, and read, " The 
heavens are the work of thy fingers," where 
now they glance at the flaming frame-work of 
the southern cross ; or spelled out, " God is 
love," where we idly follow Venus rising from 
the sea. 



82 WHAT DOES REVELATION RE VEAL ? 

Or God might have uttered truth articu- 
lately to human ears. He might have taught 
the waves of the sea a celestial syntax to which 
terrestrial hearing should be attuned. The 
volcano might have been tamed to use his 
dread vocabulary. The sirocco and the cy- 
clone might have spoken with an inexorable 
definiteness. Hail might have cried rebuke. 
Flowers might have whispered comfort. 
Birds might have sung of heaven. Men might 
have bowed to catch the least accent of the 
midnight wind in desert places, while it called : 
" Fear thou not, for I am with thee." Or we 
might have listened to the mighty lips of Ni- 
agara chanting, to what a musician claims to 
have discovered as the " Niagara chord," a 
Gloria in Excelsis Deo which the heart would 
have stood still to hear. 

Or the awful veil between this and the un- 
known world might have been rent in twain. 
The mute lips of the grave might have moved. 
The dead might have answered to the wail of 
the ages. Our starved arms might have 
clasped them for the instant which would have 
been worth all agony. 

" Oh, for five minutes with my Jean ! " 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL f 83 



cried Carlyle, desolate upon his fame. Mys- 
tery could have relented and silence spoken, 
the famine of the heart been fed, the palsy of 
the faith been freed. We need not have 
beaten the breath of our souls out against the 
barred gates of death. " The touch of a van- 
ished hand " could have set at rest our drear- 
iest doubt forever. From the sealed lips of 
our dearest dead we could have learned, and 
never questioned after, who is the Resurrec- 
tion and the Life. 

One other method was open to God in ex- 
tending a special revelation to man. He 
could act upon the legal fibre of the world. 
It was in his power to pursue a course of con- 
duct in harmony with his own system ; to act 
in accordance with laws which he had already 
established ; to reach man by human means ; 
to avoid, as far as possible, the shock and 
strain of admitting what we are accustomed, 
with great looseness of phraseology, to call 
higher laws ; to neglect in the main the spo- 
radic and the startling ; to respect premise 
and conclusion, form and dignity ; to select 
the orderly method of revealing, as he did 
the same in creating, as he does in preserving, 



84 WHAT DOES REVELATION HE VEAL f 

as he has in governing. This he has se- 
lected. It will be found, I think, if we con- 
sider carefully, that he has adopted the natu- 
ral method, with such emphatic distinctness 
as to leave us astonished at the chiaro-oscuro 
theories which theology has struggled to im- 
pel upon the credulity or reluctance of the 
world, as media of approach to a compara- 
tively simple fact. 

The Bible, in short, is not a miracle. 

It is not too much to say that many, if not 
most, of the polemic mistakes made by the op- 
ponents of the Christian Revelation have their 
root in the assumption that it claims to be a 
miracle. Skeptical exegesis had the supreme 
opportunity of the century in her hands when 
the growth of modern thought struggled, like 
a Chinese child malformed in an earthen vase, 
against distorting theories of inspiration. 

Instead of toiling with her mythical theory 9 
her legendary theory, her naturalistic theory, 
her literary theory, dissent might have turned 
upon us and said : " Your Bible is not outside 
of law, but within it, and yet your Bible 
still." But, since unbelief lacks the construc- 
tive imagination, as well as the spiritual preju- 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 



85 



dice clearly necessary to such a result, it has 
been left for the slower but subtler scholarship 
of modern faith to give to the world the only 
theories upon which it can hope a hundred 
years hence to keep any Bible at all. 

It would be difficult to find another word in 
the language which has been so wrenched as 
the word inspiration. It may belong to that 
series comprising God, the Soul, Immortality, 
of which it has been said that they never can 
present the same idea to any two minds ; but 
let us take the liberty of doubting this, and 
say, rather, that inspiration offers as much 
fixity and definiteness to thought as any other 
kind of development can. What we call in- 
spiration is a growth. It unfolds with history 
and like history. It is subject to evolution, 
like the race. It develops like the body, of 
which the particles undergo renewal every few 
years, yet it remains the same body still. What 
it was, it is, and is not now. What it is it 
will, and yet it will not, be in fifty years. 

In the matter of Biblical inspiration, if in 
any, we are to expect change as we have ex- 
perienced it, in applied scholarship, in deep- 
ening wisdom, in spiritual illumination, and in 



86 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

the laws of interpretation as affected by these 
things and others not yet within the scope 
of our perception. There is no life without 
change. Inspiration is the breathing in of 
life. 

It would be as impossible for the thoughtful 
world to hold to-day that attitude toward the 
Bible which appears, for- instance, in the 
Augsburg Confession, as it would have been 
for Solomon to write Butler's Analogy, or for 
Noah to have built an elevated railway. But 
it would be equally impossible for the Bible 
to hold the same attitude toward the world. 
If it had proved an obstinate thing, it would 
now be an obsolete one. If there had been no 
moral elasticity in it, it would before this have 
been as dead as the worship of Moloch. Life 
is motion, renewal, promise. It is only death 
which does not stir. John Robinson, at Ley- 
den, said one of the eternal things when he 
cried : " There is more light yet to break 
from God's word ! " 

Let us assume that the Bible is, above all 
things else, a natural book ; that God, in design- 
ing it, followed that beautiful " law of parsi- 
mony " which is so justly dear to instructed 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 



87 



human minds. Let us suppose that he chose 
the orderly form of communication in prefer- 
ence to the extraordinary, for reasons which 
appeal to our own intellectual standards ; that 
he selected natural illustrations of his purpose 
when he could, and fell back upon the super- 
natural only when he must ; that it is incum- 
bent upon us to bring to this book exactly the 
same qualities, as readers, which we should to 
any other important work ; that it will bear the 
same, that it deserves the same, and demands 
the same ; and that if these qualities are of the 
clearest mental and purest moral type, the 
book may stand or fall by their sentence, and 
ought to. I know of no other assumption 
which can fit a mind to approach a work pre- 
senting the claims of this. Precisely in pro- 
portion to the greatness of a call upon our 
credulity must we cultivate the impartial and 
dispassionate faculties upon whose healthful- 
ness and energy the entire value of our conclu- 
sions rests. The church has often suffered 
herself to forget this simple law. 

If the Bible is a natural book, it must be 
subject to natural rules of interpretation. If, 
as we noticed at the outset, it prove a sharp 



88 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL ? 

challenge to the human intellect, this argues 
nothing against its demands, but is rather so 
far in their favor. 

It is not true, as we are in the habit of say- 
ing lightly, that all great things are simple. 
It is true that all really great things can be 
understood, but there is the grandeur of com- 
plexity as well as of simplicity. The arts 
make this very clear. Music has food for all 
kinds of human hunger. She never gives a 
stone for bread, though to the most earthy of 
natures. It is impossible to observe the faces 
in a great audience, listening to great music, 
without an awed sense of a power so diverse 
as to be almost divine. So the Bible is at 
once simple and complex : sufficiently intelli- 
gible to the untaught ; sufficiently daunting to 
the thinker — who ought, therefore, the more to 
respect it. It has been compared to a stream, 
so deep that an elephant can swim in it ; so 
shallow that a lamb could wade across it. 

So science, again, dares her disciple on by 
difficulty. " Is it much for me," said Kepler, 
" that men should not accept my discovery ? 
When the Almighty waited six thousand years 
for one to see what he had made, I may 



WHAT DOES REVELATION BE VEAL f 89 



surely wait two hundred for one to understand 
what I have seen." 

In all other forms of revelation, the more 
closely organized the material, the better in- 
structed minds like it. One of the greatest of 
contemporaneous philosophers has taught us 
that development proceeds from the indefinite 
to the definite, and from simplicity to com- 
plexity. Why make an exception of Biblical 
revelation ? Why expect to eliminate from it 
all elements of perplexity, and all conditions 
of toiling attention ? Why even all possibility 
of misapprehension ? Or why except it from 
that lower law, as common as it is unflattering 
to human nature, which leads us to admit that, 
the more deeply a thing must be sought, the 
better it is prized ? 

Suppose we had been given the twenty-third 
Psalm inscribed by the lightning upon the 
foreheads of our hills. How soon should we 
have explained it away as an instance of sub- 
conscious cerebration ? If the soul once 
dearer to us than our own had returned from 
the dead to whisper, " Thou shalt not," in some 
convulsive moral emergency, would it have al- 
ways found a listener ? Alas, would it have 
always had a welcome ? 



90 WHAT DOES REVELATION BE VEAL f 

I think it is possible for us to conceive that 
it may not be an easy matter for the Almighty 
to gain a hearing in a human heart, and to un- 
derstand that any method of communication 
must have its disadvantages. 

That none can be perfect when he has to 
deal with such imperfect material, is a fore- 
gone conclusion. Out of a disabled organ, 
what master brings the absolute chord ? 

It is easier to say what the present educated 
views of inspiration and interpretation are 
not, than what they are. An unclerical writer 
who should attempt strictly to define the pre- 
ponderant belief of the church to-day upon a 
matter so delicate as the nature of Revelation 
would have a thankless and a useless task. 

The curse of all transitional times is upon 
us : no man represents such a period ; none 
can fitly record it till it is past. 

A few things, however, it is possible, with 
misrepresentation of none, and justice to all, 
to observe. Progressive Christian scholarship 
no longer believes in what was called verbal 
inspiration. We are not taught that the 
Bible, as a product of inspiration, is a book 
whose language was originated, corrected, and 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 91 



revised by the divine Author ; or, as Webster 
gives it, " in which the very words and forms 
of expression of the divine message are com- 
municated to the inspired author." 

No truly educated preacher teaches that the 
awful God, in such a sense, wrote the Song of 
Solomon. We do not hold that the Almighty 
troubled himself about the cloak that Paul for- 
got at Troas. No exegete calls the All- wise 
Being to account for the discrepancies between 
Matthew and John. The theory that the 
mind of God peremptorily dictated the com- 
position of the Bible, in all its minutiae, as the 
mind of Shakespeare permeated Hamlet, and 
the hand of Shakespeare directed it, is a the- 
ory already gone with the incredible nonsense 
known as the doctrine of imputed sin, which 
would have held you or me responsible for the 
guilt of Eden. 

These things are so well understood by in- 
telligent believers, that any skeptical writer 
who asserts the contrary foredooms himself to 
a fine dilemma : he carries upon the face of 
his assertion proof of an ignorance which unfits 
him to discuss the subject, or else of a moral 
obliquity in the representation of facts for 



92 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

which the courtesies of controversy have no 
permissible name. He either does not know 
the true, or he circulates the false. 

It may be said once again that the most 
modern Christian scholarship — and, in saying 
this, I mean even evangelical scholarship — 
no longer contentedly accepts what is known 
as plenary inspiration. Plenary inspiration I 
understand to be the theory that the mind of 
God, while not dictating the language of the 
canonical writers, yet exercised a compelling 
and pervading influence upon them as to mo- 
tive, matter, and manner ; that they were the 
instruments of his thought, as the keys are of 
the musician's thought, and that the whole of 
the Bible, from the Pentateuch to the Apoca- 
lypse, is in this sense inspired — the immedi- 
ate work of the divine Author. Worcester's 
definition is, " That kind of inspiration which 
excludes all mixture of error." Professor 
Parks's theory of inspiration keenly defines 
it as " such an influence over the writers of 
the Bible that all their teachings which have a 
religious character are trustworthy." 

One distinguished English clergyman, in- 
deed, is quoted as saying : " Each book [of the 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL* 93 



Bible] is unique, a solitary miracle of its class 
in human history." To this an American 
philosopher in sympathy with what are called 
the orthodox bodies of believers replies : 
" These are the assertions of men concerning 
the Scriptures rather than the assertions of the 
Scriptures concerning themselves." 

It would be easy to cite quotations in har- 
mony with this spirit, but our limits will be 
crowded without them. It is mainly impor- 
tant, for our purpose here, to understand that 
the Christianity of to-day is not founded upon 
imbecile liberalism, or hysteric emotionalism, 
or defunct theology. We are no longer deal- 
ing with a stage of religious culture capable 
of the pious lottery known as sortilege, whereby 
the accidental turning of a leaf in the Bible 
might decide the fate of a life, or of an army. 
Nor have we to do with the advance of spirit- 
ual enlightenment which could lead a father to 
baptize his baby : " He-that-believeth-not-on- 
Jesus-Christ-shall-be-damned." Nor with a 
theory of Biblical interpretation formulated in 
a theology which could require a girl to de- 
clare herself willing to be sent to hell if it were 
the will of God. 



94 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

To attack a man for the faith of his great- 
grandfather is only next to ascribing to him 
the sin of Adam, and ranks the rationalist 
among the barbarians at whom he sneers. 

There is something pathetic in the persist- 
ence with which unbelievers of a certain type 
fire away at buried creeds. It is like a can- 
nonade in a cemetery. Who is hit ? Count 
your bleeding ghosts. Seek not the living 
among the dead. About face, if you would 
find a breathing foe ! 

Intelligent Christians to-day no more sup- 
pose that babies go to hell than Strauss did. 
A growing proportion of such Christians do 
not believe that the Bible teaches the doctrine 
of an eternal hell at all. Instructed believers 
no more think that the majority of the hu- 
man race are damned than Theodore Parker 
thought it. Even the representative theo- 
logian of the old-school orthodox faith in this 
country taught in his class-room that the ma- 
jority of men are saved. The representative 
theologian of the new school is accustomed, 
before his students, to compare the number of 
the lost to the number of the saved as the in- 
mates of our prisons to the population outside 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 95 



of them. The modern Christian pulpit does 
not teach that heathen who never heard of 
Christ cannot be saved. The Christian parish 
does not learn that faith without character ever 
carried one single soul to heaven. We do not 
hold that hell is a lake of material fire. We 
do not hold that we are unable to do right 
when we wish to. Few of us think that God 
willfully foreordained some of his children to 
endless torture and some to endless peace, and 
that we cannot help ourselves, but must do as 
we were predestined to do, and abide the con- 
sequences and bless him for it. We do not 
believe that saints in heaven are happier for 
the sight of devils in hell. We do not believe 
that God gets angry. We do not believe that 
Christ died to satisfy the " vengeance " of his 
loving Father and ours. We do not believe 
that there is nothing good and beautiful and 
true in unconverted human nature. We do 
not believe that there may not be virtue in 
very bad people. We do not believe that the 
merciful and marked growth of character, to 
which the church has given the name of regen- 
eration, must of necessity take the form of a 
spiritual convulsion and jerk itself under the 



96 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

methods of a revival, or the iron limits of a 
creed. We do not believe that the Almighty 
is ignorant of the laws of heredity, or that 
he overlooks the pressure of circumstance on 
human character. We do not believe that he 
ever created a soul, the least, the lowest, the 
most denied, the most sorely bestead by life, 
and pushed it aside as nature and the modern 
philosopher do, as an unfit survivor, beneath 
his careful respect and personal tenderness. 
We do not believe that he does not love poor 
wretches better than we do. We do not be- 
lieve that he will not treat them better than 
we should. We do not believe, and our 
scholars do not teach us that our Bible re- 
quires us to believe these things. 

Neither do we believe that God made the 
world in six days of twenty-four hours each ; 
that Moses may not have absorbed a great 
deal of Egyptian culture ; nor that the early 
Jews were not barbarians who acted and were 
treated accordingly ; nor that David and Solo- 
mon were ideal modern Christians ; nor that 
Matthew and Luke were skilled as genealo- 
gists ; nor that the substance of the Golden 
Rule had never been taught before Christ 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 97 

taught it ; nor that Gautama, and Mohammed, 
and Confucius did not say a great deal that 
was true. Nor do we assert that Moses and 
Paul knew as much science as Herbert Spen- 
cer ; we simply suggest, let me say in passing, 
that the Omniscient may. 

Though at the risk of being met by certain 
of my fellow-Christians with the historic reply 
of Priscilla to John Alden, I think I have not 
ventured too much in saying that, whatever 
else the Scriptures mean or give to modern 
belief, these are among the things which they 
do not reveal. 

Many of the dogmas attributed to us exist 
now only upon the lips or the pages of our 
opponents. Our young people are familiar 
with them chiefly in skeptical literature. 

Our educated pulpit does not teach them, 
our pews do not demand them, our press does 
not circulate them, our scholars smile at them, 
our saints have outgrown them. Our exploded 
theories provide occupation still for anxious 
and aimless infidels of a certain sort, but 
Christian scholarship must pass them with the 
silence which is the only practicable reply of 
any science to any charlatanism. 



98 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

Where is the Christian apologist who taunts 
Science with her abandoned outposts ? Who 
accuses her because George Washington was 
bled to death? Who denounces her because 
no physician in Europe over the age of forty 
accepted Harvey's discovery of the circulation 
of the blood ? Yet such jeers were on a level 
with the hue and cry to which scholars like 
Teschendorf, or Robertson Smith, or Bishop 
Lightfoot are expected to give chase. 

Let us remember that systematic religious 
belief is a science, as well as botany or physi- 
ology ; like other sciences, subject to human 
mistake, correction, and slow development ; 
that Revelation has no more done revealing 
than the cell-theory, or the theory of spon- 
taneously moving plants ; and that we are to 
regard the Bible, not as a splendidly wrought 
sarcophagus, but as the bed of a deep and 
magnificent ocean, wherein is hid treasure 
that the life of a man, or a race, may dive for 
and not exhaust. 

Bearing this clearly in mind, the first thing 
which we observe about the Bible is that it 
is a human history, written by men, and for 
men, and to be judged by human standards. 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL f 



99 



Whatever God has to do with it is for us a 
matter of inference, not of assumption. What- 
ever be the supernatural element in it, we are 
to decide as a result, not as a condition, of 
our study of the book. We are not to bring 
to this study an a priori conviction that the 
whale did, any more than that he did not, 
swallow Jonah. 

All that any believer in the Bible has a 
right to ask, or needs to ask, is that it should 
be subjected to the same historical laws 
which govern other books. If historical sci- 
ence should do away with the personality of 
Adam, — what then ? The believer should 
be the last to insist upon it for the truth's 
sake ; the reality of Revelation is not affected 
by the surrender of this or that trifling detail 
or theory ; it would be ruined by an evasion 
of truth. If the Bible cannot stand the same 
tests with other histories, we want to know 
it, and we want to be the first to know it. 

It is the belief of careful Christian scholar- 
ship, as it is the concession of the fairest skep- 
tical learning, that the book stands the test. 
Kenan says of the Gospels : " All, in my 
judgment, date back to the first century, and 



100 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

they are substantially by the authors to whom 
they are attributed." 

We have a human history of at least equal 
claims with others ; w 7 ith, at all events, no 
more than their share of errors, inconsisten- 
cies, and difficulties ; to be handled with the 
same critical skill and honor as Josephus and 
Xenophon and Grote ; and was it not Les- 
sing who said, " If Livy and Dionysius and 
Polybius and Tacitus are so candidly and 
liberally treated that we do not stretch them 
on the rack for a syllable, why should not 
Matthew and Mark and Luke and John be 
treated as well " ? 

We shall not, however, quarrel with him 
who demands that the Scriptures be handled 
with greater critical skill than other histories ; 
their claims are greater, and may require it ; 
but we insist that, for the same reason, the in- 
tellectual and moral candor of the critic shall 
be guarded in proportion to the size of the 
subject and the cause at stake. No human 
history has received and endured the critical 
strain which has been brought to bear upon 
the Christian Scriptures. A German scholar 
once wrote a keen little book, in which he ap- 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 101 



plied to the personality of Martin Luther the 
same kinds of historical methods which have 
been exercised upon that of Christ, thereby 
proving the general untrustworthiness of the 
fact of Luther. Another skillful writer has, by 
a similar treatment, shown, with marked effect, 
that Caesar was never assassinated. Whate- 
ley's application of this principle to Napoleon 
is a familiar instance in the same direction. 

Whatever Revelation reveals, then, it can- 
not be too clearly emphasized that it reveals 
by sifting through the hard, fine sieve of hu- 
man history. The natural way God chose, and 
chose it in this most natural form. We have 
to deal with the records of an ancient people ; 
with their remoteness and barbarism, their 
politics, progress, and decline ; with their su- 
perstitions and faith, their virtues and vices, 
their pretensions and claims ; and, further, 
with whatever moral or spiritual objects the 
internal evidence of the Book may offer as 
sufficient reasons for the selection of * this par- 
ticular people for the position of extraordinary 
importance which their Scriptures have given 
them in the world's thought. 

The Bible reveals once more, in a degree 



102 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

unequaled by any human production, a power 
of adaptation to human consciousness. " The 
Bible finds me," said Coleridge, " as nothing 
else does." Assuming that God had preferred 
the literary method and had chosen a collection 
of Hebrew chronicles, poems, and letters as 
the medium of communicating to men some- 
thing of value which Nature had not expressed, 
it would be expected that he would appeal, so 
far as his media permitted, to that which un- 
derlies all philosophy and defies all dogma- 
tism. " There is a point of view beyond the 
sphere of philosophy," says Goethe, " namely, 
that of common sense." There are a few 
things about ourselves which we know ; to 
these the Bible addresses itself with a subtlety 
and a force which, to be sure, taken by them- 
selves, it is not necessary to call supernatural, 
but which certainly transcend anything which 
we have yet experienced in other literary in- 
fluences. 

Men have misery, an uneasy conscience, 
disenchantment with life, reluctance to death, 
desire for eternal existence, and isolation of 
the soul. We do not turn to our Dante for 
such a plain, old-fashioned thing as comfort ; 



WHAT DOES RE VELA Tl ON RE VEAL f 103 

Goethe has no forgiveness to offer a stained 
nature shuddering and cowering before itself ; 
Homer lends few illusions to the unconfessed 
emptiness of our days ; Virgil does not draw 
the sting from the fang of our last hours ; 
Shakespeare cannot promise us immortality, 
nor draw near to the inner solitude in which 
all men walk, but the sensitive perish. 

Great grief and great guilt drive mankind 
where they can get something greater. Strong 
fear and strong hope hold us where we can 
find something stronger. Sin and suffering 
are the deepest facts of life. Real emotions 
are a keen touchstone to the real. The com- 
mon crises, the plebeian forces, the plain, uni- 
versal fates and chances, test our prophets and 
ourselves. 

" Though I am a Hellene at heart," con- 
fessed the invalid Heine, " the book has not 
only well entertained me, but also deeply edi- 
fied me. What a book ! . . . The whole 
drama of humanity (is) in this book. It is 
the book of books — Biblia." 

" Need you ask ? " said the dying Scott, 
when requested to name the book which he 
would have read. " Need you ask ? There is 
but one." 



104 WHA T D OES RE VELA Tl ON RE VEAL ? 

Quarrel with it as we may, doubt it as we 
often must, perplexed by it as we shall always 
be, criticise it as we dare, neglect it as we 
do, the fact remains, and remains one of au- 
gust significance, that, in those emergencies 
of life which are fathoms deep below all in- 
tellectual querulousness or self-delusion, the 
Bible grasps us as the very hand of God 
might do, if we could find in this fact alone 
sufficient proof that the hand of God is in it. 

We have our infectious as well as our 
incommunicable doubts. Unbelief is subject 
to fashions. The scientific pose is so clearly 
a la mode, it would seem strange that it has 
overlooked in the Bible by far the most im- 
portant support which can be found for the 
theories which teach us to believe in the evo- 
lution of the race. 

Revelation reveals the only clear basis of 
hope there is that the world can ever become 
what unbelieving science claims that it will. 

Our modern dream of humanity is nothing 
else than Christianity in a mask domino. The 
altruism of the prevailing philosophy owes its 
existence to the principles taught by Jesus, 
and its influence to the power of his individ- 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 



105 



uality upon the world. What is that auda- 
cious fantasy known as the " invention of im- 
mortality " but a cheap parody on the splendid 
Biblical promise of a life hereafter ? 

Revelation contains the only true democ- 
racy. Respect for the despised may be said 
to have originated with Christ. He first re- 
duced the capricious and inefficient impulses 
of human sympathy to a permanent force. 
He taught the inexorable demands of poverty 
upon possession. He wrought havoc with the 
criminalities of selfish social ease. He gave 
challenge to the sloth and the slumber of hu- 
man fellowship. He preached religious free- 
dom and rebuked superstition. 

The deference of strength to weakness, the 
patience of wisdom with folly, the tenderness 
of integrity to error, the claims of suffering 
upon joy, the right of the individual to his 
own God, were never powerfully formulated 
and practically illustrated in the same individ- 
ual until he formulated and illustrated them. 
The so-called "religion of humanity " is the 
most amazing theft that the history of phi- 
losophy has known. It has stolen from the 
lips of the Carpenter's Son the principles of 



106 WHAT DOES BEVEL ATI ON RE VEAL f 

human progress, over which a little knot of 
scholars and scoffers are grouped to-day, with 
the expression of those who discover the se- 
cret of existence. These principles, and these 
alone, present the only possible chance for the 
development of the race from its existing 
crudeness to the beautiful finish of which ma- 
terialist and believer dream. The theories of 
the New Testament contain the seeds of the 
highest because the broadest culture. They 
respect the people. They build our hospitals, 
our asylums, our Magdalen homes, our public 
schools, the scholarships in our great universi- 
ties ; they open the oriental harems to our fe- 
male physicians, our libraries to day-laborers, 
our academies to freed slaves, our colleges to 
women, our republics to their citizens. Blot 
the philosophy of the Nazarene out of the 
world, and these things go with it. This phi- 
losophy, and this alone, places that importance 
on the individual which makes personal growth 
possible upon any such scale as to become gen- 
eral development. 

Jesus Christ taught the value of the unit; 
he gave us this factor in social statics. He 
represented the enfranchisement of faith ; he 



WHAT DOES REVELATION BE VEAL? 107 



gave this basis to our spiritual science. Strive 
as we would, we can no more outgrow our 
debt to him as a social reformer, or the chief 
apostle of religious freedom, than the wine can 
disallow its own grapes, or the rainbow ignore 
the prism. " Let mental culture go on ad- 
vancing," admitted Goethe, " let the natural 
sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, 
and the human mind expand as it may, it will 
never go beyond the elevation and moral cul- 
ture of Christianity as it glistens and shines 
forth in the Gospel ! " 

The remarkable conformity of the Scrip- 
tures to personal consciousness and to uni- 
versal history is an important argument in 
favor of the reality of the Biblical claims, but 
does not seem to be a final one. Let it meet 
the individual or the general needs with what- 
ever force or subtlety, the demands of this 
Book are so tremendous, if false they are so 
preposterous, that it ought to be subjected to 
every test of intellect and conscience that we 
can bring to bear upon it. 

If we can find anything else professing to 
be a revelation from God which is less per- 
plexing, more simple, more reasonable, we 



108 WHAT DOES REVELATION EE VEAL f 

should be bound to drop this. " Give me a 
better book, and I will," was the profound 
reply of a Christian who was asked to sur 7 
render the Bible. 

Candid unbelievers readily acknowledge the 
superiority of the Christian to all other Scrip- 
tures. Uncandid ones admit the same by the 
virulence and persistence of their defiance to 
the Bible. 

" There is no recognition in the Koran of 
human brotherhood." Many orientalists claim 
that Buddhism gives us no personal god. The 
Edda, and the Zend Avesta, and the Vedas 
have too many gods. The Sacred Books of 
Confucius offer little or no hope of immortal- 
ity. It is not too much to say that, on the 
whole, and to the best of our knowledge and 
belief, tested by that consensus of the intel- 
ligent and devout which alone is competent to 
pass judgment upon a question in which the 
spiritual faculties as well as the reasoning 
must be qualified jurors, our Bible reveals the 
best explanation we have of the phenomena 
of life. 

It is a mysterious one, it is an imperfect 
one, it is a half-developed one, but it is the 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 109 



best we have. It is the best we have, because 
it is the most humane ; therefore, in so far, 
the most divine. It is the most humane and 
the most divine because it reveals the rela- 
tion of Jesus Christ to the problem of exist- 
ence. 

To practical people of instructed intelli- 
gence, but not of the theological or metaphys- 
ical temperaments which will amuse them- 
selves with the casuistries of the thing to the 
end of human leisure, it seems to me that the 
whole matter resolves itself into something like 
this : 

We are here, we know not how or why. 
We are in a world of certain misery and 
uncertain pleasure. Life is a dark marvel. 
Death is a blind leap. The future is silent. 
God is a mystery. Nature is terrible. Why 
are we thrust, the pawns in an awful game ? 
Why, why were we tossed, the weeds on a 
fathomless sea ? What did the Creator of the 
earth mean by so seemingly cruel a waste of 
human sensitiveness and force ? Who can find 
him reasons for an apparently merciless ven- 
ture at world-making ? Here comes calmly 
upon our bluster and battle a Book whose his- 



110 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL* 

tory is so singular that its unique pretensions 
scarcely excite our surprise, however they in- 
fluence our credulity. 

It assumes to declare to us the existence of 
a wise and affectionate God, whose children 
we are, and whose purposes to us it partially 
explains. It presumes to treat us as immortal 
souls. It dares to promise us eternal life. It 
delights to offer us that satisfaction of body, 
mind, and spirit known as heaven. It does 
not shrink from foretelling the moral conse- 
quences of evil in this or any world. It al- 
lures us to purity. It would comfort us in 
sorrow. It would save us from despair. It 
would stimulate confidence in the Author of 
life, and our trust in that sequel to it which 
follows death. It is true that this book fails to 
tell us why God made the world at all. It is 
as silent as reason, it is as dumb as the stars, 
upon this tremendous question. It is, possibly, 
one of the objects of our existence to learn that 
we are too small to ask a question of this size ; 
that divine motives are not material for hu- 
man grasp, like fossils, or mollusks, or typhoid 
fever. However that may be, the Bible meets 
us squarely upon the deepest and the highest 



WHAT DOES BEVEL ATI OX EE VEAL? Ill 

question which the finite intellect has the right 
to ask : What, having made us at all, is God's 
moral attitude toward us ? When he thrust 
into space this quivering ball of pain and 
error, did he mean well enough by it to jus- 
tify the deed ? 

Profounder than all our philosophy, wiser 
than all our protest, comes the sublime and 
solitary answer : " lie so loved the ivorld that 
he gave his only Son" 

This magnificent reply, which theology has 
distorted out of its grand and simple propor- 
tions, to which science has refused its supreme 
reasonableness, the true human heart and the 
clear human head have accepted. The contor- 
tions of faith and the malice of doubt have 
almost equally united to shake the hold of this 
great re-assurance upon the world. The world 
will have it in spite of both. The world will 
have it, because it is the best it can get ; and 
by all the iron laws of common sense it will 
keep the best till God or man can offer it 
something better. 

The Bible, then, we say, is a mysterious 
book ; as yet possibly a misunderstood, cer- 
tainly an ill-understood one ; it has been as 



112 WHAT- DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

much abused as used ; it has cloaked amazing 
error and shielded incredible crime ; it has 
been the object of idolatrous worship and of 
infernal hate ; it has aroused almost all the 
passions of humanity. The crude, emotional 
stages of the world's life have spent them- 
selves upon it, like weather on a rock. Now, 
as we approach the ages of disciplined thought 
and deepened spiritual forces, the form of the 
conflict will change only as much as it must 
intensify. 

Far be it from me to involve any other be- 
liever in an individual conviction, or to claim 
to represent the shifting and various phases of 
faith in the Christian church to-day, by a per- 
sonal theory of inspiration, when I say that 
the Bible of the future must be interpreted 
chiefly as a biography. 

The day may come when our views of the 
divine purpose, as exemplified in the Old Tes- 
tament, will receive even more modification 
than they have already done, and that is very 
great. 

" There is no such reverential use of the 
truth as a bold use of it," finely says President 
Bascom. "No other use implies the same 
confidence in it." 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 113 

The time may be at hand, not when all 
element of the supernatural shall be elimi- 
nated from a work which, so far as we can now 
see, must retain a measure of it as a coun- 
tersign of its sacred and exceptional errand, 
but when the proportions of that element 
shall be perceptibly decreased. If the Jewish 
Scriptures should come to be regarded, mainly, 
as the religious and political records of a peo- 
ple whose national importance the events of the 
New Testament, and these alone, explain ; if 
we find ourselves led to subject their legends 
and miracles to the same intelligent tests by 
which we have already tried their cosmogony 
and chronology, and if the one should share in 
large measure the same fate that has overtaken 
the other ; though Eden were an allegory, and 
though God never told Abraham to kill Isaac, 
and though we were obliged to consider it 
doubtful whether Samson slew a thousand 
men with the jaw-bone of an ass, the value 
of the Bible would be no more infringed 
than the glory of the moon is affected by the 
" discouraging condition " of lunar theories, 
concerning which a scientific student tells us 
that her " actual place in the heavens is now 



114 WHAT DOES REVELATION EE VEAL t 

so different from her calculated place that a 
sailor would be misled by it, as to his longi- 
tude, five miles." 

If, indeed, we come at length to prize the 
Old Testament, — for its matchless devotional 
literature, to be sure, its august historic asso- 
ciations and profound ministry to certain 
forms of human need, but mainly because it 
represents the genealogical stage of that great 
Memoir whose central Figure is the hope of 
the world, — the power of the Bible will no 
more be lost than the color of the rose was 
lost by the discovery of the metamorphosis of 
plants. That majestic Figure remains, and the 
details of its history advance with increasing 
literary and moral effect, through the precious 
pages of the New Testament, to their climax. 
The Gospels tell the story and report the in- 
struction of Christ. The Epistles formulate 
his theology. The Apocalypse is a vision of 
the final mystery to which all fact and all 
faith are tending — a vision seen by the soul 
that he loved best, and that may have, must 
have, absorbed most of the miracle of his na- 
ture. 

The biography marches on, with splendid 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 115 



disregard of all petty criticisms, to its great 
historical and ethical ends. God used such 
material as he had. He seems to have cared 
chiefly to select men who would not lie, and 
trusted the necessary imperfections of such a 
work, performed by such instruments as he 
could get, to the good sense of mankind. 

One might almost say that it does not seem 
to have occurred to the great Compiler of 
these scattered records that the world would 
ever question the main purpose or use of the 
Bible, because the Jews killed their captives 
or Matthew made a mistake in a genealogical 
table ! How small, beside the loftiness of the 
divine plan which overrode the human group- 
ing of these humanly written records, shows 
the peevish spirit which demands that he weed 
the human out of them, and because he did 
not dares him to prove that he had anything 
to do with them at all ! 

Whatever the future of Biblical exegesis may 
bring forth, it is difficult to see reason for believ- 
ing that the miracles of the New Testament will 
ever be entirely " explained away ; " though 
that may be a piece of private conservatism. 
We have no more right, as has been well sug- 



116 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL f 

gested, to assume that there can be no miracle, 
than that there must. The facts, and the facts 
alone, must make the theory. The scientific 
basis of thought has taught us as much as this. 
Let Christianity be too apt a pupil to forget 
it. The evidential proofs that Jesus possessed 
supernatural powers seem so far to rest where 
the other historical proof of the narrative 
does ; and so far both, or neither, are to be 
accepted. But even supposing that candid 
and devout scholarship should eventually leave 
us little of these miraculous incidents except 
the great fact and symbol of the Resurrection, 
it is certain that we should not lose our Bible 
with them. We should lose nothing unless we 
lost the Christ. lie is the miracle. Revela- 
tion reveals him. He is the message of God 
to man. Through him is the divine law of- 
fered to human obedience. By him all that 
it has pleased the Ruler of the world to ex- 
plain of his moral government is expressed. 
Jesus Christ is Revelation, and Revelation is 
Jesus Christ. 

The famous and familiar words of Lecky 
come with more force to us, just here, than any 
Christian estimate of this sacred personality 
could exert : 



WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 117 

" It was reserved for Christianity to present 
to the world an ideal character which, through 
all the changes of eighteen centuries, has filled 
the hearts of men with an impassioned love. 
. . . It may be truly said that the simple rec- 
ord of three short years of active life has done 
more to regenerate and soften mankind than 
all the disquisitions of philosophers, and than 
all the exhortations of moralists." 

What this principle of regeneration means 
to the race it is impossible for any one not a 
student of human history ignorantly to de- 
scribe. What this means to the individual 
soul it is preposterous for any one not in per- 
sonal rapport with Christ and his teachings 
ignorantly to decide. 

Here we enter a phase of the argument 
where a certain advance in spiritual culture is 
clearly essential to discussion ; and here those 
who have, and they who have not, a conscious- 
ness of their own spiritual natures, and of the 
famished needs and disused powers which 
throb through them, must stand apart. 

Revelation reveals less science, less dog- 
matic theology, less miracle, than we used to 
think, but more of Christ. The Bible is a 



118 WHAT DOES REVELATION REVEAL? 

frame of which he is the picture. We have 
no right to turn from it till we have received 
into, and tested by our own, that marvelous 
and mystic life. 

When we have absorbed within ourselves 
his wide-reaching philosophy, his dazzling per- 
sonal purity, his organic humanity, his supreme 
unselfishness, — then, and not till then, shall 
we have that ethical illumination which will 
intellectually fit us to deny that the Bible re- 
veals the Science of Life. 



IV. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

Life is either a problem or a play ; which, 
will be decided by temperament rather than 
by circumstance. The instinct of the dra- 
matic, the passion to be pleased, are as com- 
pulsory in their way as suffering or thought. 
Superficiality, we must remember, may be as 
inevitable as sensitiveness. The man who 
said that for his part he always got away from 
unhappy people, had either more candor or less 
tact than most of his sort ; but it is a sort 
that can no more be disregarded in an estimate 
of the world than any other of the defective 
classes. The impulse with which we embrace 
or repulse the higher form of fact, may be the 
decisive trait that must generalize us in a 
classification of species at which science has 
not yet arrived. 

Individuality is the one essential fact of 



120 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

life ; its presence, in whatever surplus or wry- 
ness, is matter of calculable regard, as its ab- 
sence is of futile regret. There never was a 
wiser saying than his who told us that for our 
faults of exuberance there might be all possi- 
ble remedies ; for our deficiencies — none. A 
nicer distinction between defects and deficien- 
cies might further refine the illustration. 

Who are they who conquer nature, create 
kingdoms, discover truth, rule society, comfort 
anguish, and purify evil ? It is truism to say : 
the men and women who have been them- 
selves. Whom do we seek in some famine of 
the mind ? Not him who conforms, who is 
fractional rather than integral. Or to whom 
do we turn when our hearts are breaking ? 
Not to the smoothest, but to the strongest per- 
sonality that is intelligible or available to our 
own. We all know men who are mental der- 
ricks, hoisting everybody within reach. We 
have all felt people who are moral cyclones, 
hurling everything out of their track. 

Yet force is not of necessity noisy. Love 
is not boisterous. The atmosphere is not ob- 
trusive. A woman's will may be silent, and 
may " be done," like Heaven's. " The strong 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 121 

power called weakness " has its own kingdom. 
We may be in the clutch of the earthquake, 
or the slave of a still, small voice. Insistence 
has many natures ; they are alike only in this : 
that they insist. 

The tendency of individuality is to vigor ; 
and because to vigor, therefore to duration of 
life. This seems a very simple thing to say. 
If it be strictly true and thoroughly believed, 
it may be seen to have complex results, some 
of which it will be the object of this paper to 
consider ; not as truths which can presume 
to be called new, but rather, by the season of 
prevailing thought, renewed. 

That the trend of individuality is toward 
force and permanence, we are reminded at 
every turn. Diffusion is feebleness. Speech 
weakens feeling. The flood lessens the cur- 
rent. Shallowness produces evaporation. 
Commonness reduces preciousness. Deep 
emotions are perpetuated ; mighty love means 
constancy, and marked hate is incurable. 
Vigorous characters reproduce themselves ; 
emphasized characteristics are hereditary ; 
and so on. The list is practically endless. 

In this last connection, we are all more or less 



122 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

familiar with the work of modern science ; a 
work whose value, as we shall presently see, 
only begins with its physical aspects, and out 
of which a higher science has still to be evolved 
by a discoverer possibly yet unborn. 

Our late great apostle of natural science 
has popularized for us several indispensable 
terms, in which it is as natural for the mind to 
think to-day as it was for the child Montaigne 
to exclaim in Latin when his father fainted. 
One of these useful words is Selection. The 
facts of selection — natural, sexual, and un- 
conscious — in the history of man and of the 
lower organizations, are established for intel- 
ligence beyond the right of ignorance to ques- 
tion. These facts and the meaning of the 
facts are in our primers now. The same may 
be said of that most happy phrase, the strug- 
gle for existence. 

"Nothing is easier," says Darwin himself, 
" than to admit in words the truth of the uni- 
versal struggle for life, or more difficult — at 
least I have found it so — than constantly to 
bear this conclusion in mind. Yet, unless it be 
thoroughly engraved in the mind, the whole 
economy of nature . . . will be dimly seen, or 
quite misunderstood." 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 123 

The apparently trifling or irrelevant minu- 
tiae crowding the pages which lay bare to the 
world the curiously interesting processes that 
go to the creation of a great theory have a 
special, but not always superficially evident, 
value in the direction of our thought. 

We are told, for instance, that if the multi- 
plication from a single pair of elephants were 
unchecked by accident or death, in seven hun- 
dred and fifty years there would be nineteen 
million elephants alive. We are reminded 
that in Paraguay neither cattle, horses, nor 
dogs run wild, because their infant progeny 
are destroyed by a certain parasitic fly, which 
has preempted that vague ? geographical region. 
We read that heart' s-ease and red clover w T ould 
disappear from England if humble-bees were 
exterminated there. Or we hear of the " walk- 
ing-stick insect," which, that it may protect 
itself from danger, is made to resemble a 
" walking-stick closely overgrown with moss." 
Or again, we are asked to believe that the 
ball-and-socket decorations on the wing-feath- 
ers of the Argus pheasant are aesthetically ap- 
preciated by the female during courtship. Or 
our attention is concentrated upon the fact 



124 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

that among the Kalmucks, who practice the 
custom of bridal races (the bride having a fair 
start), " no instance occurs of a girl being 
caught unless she has a partiality for the pur- 
suer." Or we are told that if human repro- 
duction were not offset by mortality, there 
would not, in a thousand years, be standing- 
room upon the earth for the progeny of man. 
Again, we are reminded that the Holy Inqui- 
sition killed off the bravest, freest, and most 
independent minds of its time, and thus appre- 
ciably depleted Europe of her best material. 
Or it is suggested that the culture of Greece 
and the empire of Rome seem to have their 
chief purpose and value as subsidiaries " to 
the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration 
to the West." Or we are asked if the idea 
of a universal and beneficent Creator be not 
the result, in the mind of man, of elevation 
" by long-continued culture." 

The connection of these rather burly state- 
ments with the spiritual future of mankind is 
not at first sight apparent ; and, to the merely 
scientific student, may remain obscure. Yet 
the continuity in such a progression of selected 
facts is subtle, and the workmanship nice. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 125 



From beginning to end, the link within the 
link is the force of individuality. The relation 
of individuality to spirituality completes the 
chain which, in view of that relation, it is here 
our purpose to examine. 

Man is born to fight for his life. This is 
the upshot of the new wisdom. (After all it 
is rather an old wisdom.) He has been de- 
veloped from ancestral, inferior organizations 
which, in turn, have had to fight for their 
lives. All the great and little facts of history 
converge to this truth. Conflict with the ele- 
ments has mown down non-combatants. Th-3 
attraction between the sexes has served as the 
great appreciator of personal values. Death, 
like " gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone," has 
stood guard against the event of the world's 
becoming uninhabitable from excess of life. 
Climate, disease, accident, anguish, love, war, 
superstition, even civilization itself, have each 
served their turn in the awful battle. All 
are but so many foes to the new-born babe. 
Carlyle put one view of the truth in his 
rough way when he said that the ultimate 
question between any two human beings is : 
"Can I kill thee? or, canst thou kill me?" 



126 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

We rate by thousands of years the age of 
the great design carved in the Cambodian 
temple, which represents a wheel of incho- 
ate, writhing forms — serpents, dragons, mon- 
keys, and men — revolving in a conflict vast 
and mysterious, and typifying u The Struggle 
of Natural Life toward the Ideal and Spir- 
itual." Existence is a challenge. Circum- 
stance is the gauntlet. Success is victory, 
and failure is defeat. Death is, or may be, 
escape. 

It will be seen that to say all this is to say 
simply that the struggle for existence is de- 
cided by the ratio of individuality to the odds. 
Whether we have to do with the duels of mas- 
todons in a prehistoric forest, or the conflict 
<of an Esquimau with the elements, or the 
broken heart of Sappho, or the dying bed 
of Keats ; whether we are dealing with the 
'extermination of a tribe of Kaffirs, or the 
decline of an over-civilized empire, or the fall 
of an outlawed religion, the radical elements 
of the question are the same. Personality is 
power. Behind every great success is an in- 
dividual. There is the absence or the destruc- 
tion of one in every great defeat. Who con- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 127 

quers ? The integer. Who fails ? The frac- 
tion. 

It should be remembered, of course, that in- 
dividuality may be subtle or strong, and that 
conquest may be apparent or real. Success 
may be a matter of muscle or of imagination. 
Defeat may come from brain or brawn. There 
is victory of the digestion and failure of the; 
temper. There is failure of the nerves and 
victory of the spirit. There is weakness o£ 
the conscience and power of the will. There 
is success in the incidental and temporary, 
and there is failure in the essential and per- 
manent. There is deification of the body and 
insult to the soul. There is ruin of the body 
and construction of the soul. An untimely 
fit of hysteria may cost a woman the intel- 
lectual ambition of all her days. A man with 
the prosperities of life in his hand may lose, 
by a rude word or a selfish deed, the heart 
of the woman who woold have been worth 
to him the world and the glory thereof. Of 
Napoleon, it has been said by a recent histo- 
rian that he w r as a threefold being, of active 
intellect, imperious will, and deficient moral 
sense ; and, from the hollow of that deficiency, 



128 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY, 



(history measures his surplus and his success, 
j Christ was called a failure by his conteni- 



J It needs no historian to remind us that in- 
dividuality is, in fact, the result of a conflict 
between widely differing and by no means 
necessarily obvious agencies — the effect of 
counteraction between the evident and the sug- 
gested, or between the seen and the unseen. 
!. It needs no prophet to tell us that this coun- 
teraction is to become more complicated as it 
is overtaken by civilization ; that the propor- 
tion of the obvious to the latent is likely to be 
lessened ; that the relativity of the evident to 
the suggested will undergo change ; and that 
the ratio of the seen to the unseen may be ex- 
rpected to suffer mathematical transference, 
s This is to say, in brief, that, for a man to 
?, become a force, is to be one among diversely 
imany, or one through harmoniously many 
raiings. And, that to become a force in the 
f ( uture, is probably to be a much less simple 
j matter than it is now, or has ever been. An 
individual, in fact, represents not only a huge 



ff pent an increasing amount of tactical ability. 



poraries. 




capacity, but must repre- 



v 

\ 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 



129 



A powerful personality may be said to be 
what the Hahnemannians call " a complex of 
symptoms." 

The love of life is one of the elements o£ 
life ; we might say that it is what physiolo- 
gists call one of the " proximate principles " 
of life. It is not enough merely to say that 
the love of life is normal — it is life. The 
most exhausted victim of existence will admit 
that it is his exhaustion which ails him. Bul- 
wer says somewhere that there is a want more 
fierce than the want of food, more terrible 
than the want of sleep ; it is " the want to 
die." The world-weariness which is so incon- 
testable a feature of our age was foretold 
long ago by an ancient Persian proverb, which 
ran : " When men, in passing by the newly 
made grave, shall say, ' Would God I were 
there ! ' the end of the world is nigh." 

But even suicide in no sense intrudes upon 
the main truth, simple as a primary color, and 
organic as the action of the heart ; — that to 
be alive is to wish to live. He who desires 
death has already begun to die. He who 
reaches the point of encroaching upon death 



130 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

is already virtually dead. Such encroach- 
ment is simply a form of the universal fact. 
The passion for self-destruction is but one 
means of accomplishing dissolution. One man 
"has typhus fever ; one cuts his throat ; one 
has consumption ; another has suicide. Each 
is a disease. The incipient cough that nobody 
notices, and the first toying with the cocked 
pistol that nobody knows, may be, for phi- 
losophical purposes, the same thing. This is 
not the place to discuss the moral aspects of 
suicide, of which I have here nothing to say. 

The undeniable extension of self-destruc- 
tion, as tabulated by the best statisticians of 
the subject to-day, only substantiates the pre- 
mise in a high sense. It is reluctantly ad- 
mitted by some of the bleakest materialists 
among these statisticians that one of the pre- 
vailing causes of the increase of suicide is the 
increase of religious unbelief. This is, per- 
haps, the subtlest illustration yet in hand of 
our point — setting quite aside its use in a 
didactic sense. 

The doomed being who anticipates death 
everlasting, as his part and lot in the prob- 
lem of universal suffering, stretches forth his 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 131 



hand to clutch his portion, and is, in effect, 
already dead, because he is to die. Death sets 
in with the passion for death. Life implies 
the love of life. Other things being equal, 
the healthy body craves life. Other things 
being equal, the healthy soul demands life. It 
may be said that none of us are ever actually 
beaten in the battle of existence except by un- 
timely death, by madness, or by what it is 
now a little old-fashioned to call sin. 

The desire for eternal life is a very old hu- 
man preference. It must be also admitted to 
be a very strong one. It is impossible here 
to do more than recall the existence of the 
immense mass of scholarship and sentiment, 
faith and dogmatism, wisdom and folly, which 
have been wreaked upon the sole aspect of 
the subject that raises the question whether 
belief in the future life is intuitive in the 
mind of man. 

This paper does not presume to enter upon 
that venerable and tremendous discussion, but 
would suggest its huge proportions in the his- 
tory of thought as significant far beyond the 
reach of mere argument. However we come 



132 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

by the wish to live forever, the fact seems to 
be that most of us have it. Whatever were 
the private views of the Cave-men, or even 
the current of thought in the Jewish theocracy 
upon this point, it seems to be true, so far as 
the evidential testimony is in, that the race 
has desired, if not expected, continuance after 
death. 

This fact alone would not prove that we 
should get what we desire ; but it is certainly 
not a good reason for showing why we should 
miss it. To say that no subject whatever has 
so deeply stimulated the human mind as that 
of a life to come is not to overstate the case. 
The agitations of love and the consequences 
of death have been the two fundamental ob- 
jects of interest in this world ; and of these 
twin princes, the gentler has yielded the crown 
to the sterner brother. Where is the lover 
whose ardor would not be chilled by an ap- 
parition or an earthquake ? 

A glance at the literature of eschatology, 
as represented in the catalogues of even our 
secular and popular libraries, astonishes one 
who looks at them for the first time. A cele- 
brated publisher once said that to put the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 133 



word Heaven into the title of a book was 
enough to insure the sale of it. I remember 
to have heard one of the most philosophical of 
men — the least impetuous either in thought 
or speech, and one of the best trained in in- 
tellect and character — say that he would pre- 
fer any life, even that of a supposable world 
of woe, to annihilation. A man who has ac- 
quired the habit of living is loath to suspend it. 
His custom has become his appetite ; it seems 
to him even to have become his right. 

Christian philosophy has a certain respect- 
able position among systems of thought. As 
a system, it has somewhat emphatic bearings 
upon the idea which we are pursuing. 

It is the great point, so to speak, of the 
Christian religion, that it conforms vigorously 
to the vigorous love of existence in the ex- 
isting. It meets this high instinct on lofty 
ground ; it treats it with the respect due any 
such elemental impulse ; it deals not with the 
dream, but the deed ; it offers no fantasy, but 
a promise ; it plunges us in no reverie, but 
holds us to an assurance ; and mocks us not 
with myths, but controls us with facts. 



134 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

"God," it has been well said, by a great 
metaphysician, " is chiefly of interest to us in 
so far as he is the condition of our immortal- 
ity." Recognizing this truth, Christian phi- 
losophy squarely offers duration of life to the 
individual. 

Such an offer, it will be said, has been 
made before. True, and happily true. Were 
this not so, had the race existed six thousand 
years — or sixty — more or less, with no more 
hope of perpetuity after death than so many 
kangaroos, the originality of Christianity might 
have been her practical destruction, and that 
which has been accepted as an inspiration 
might have been set aside as an "ism." It 
may be claimed, however, that the Christian 
form of the offer of immortality is, up to this 
time, the most reasonable which has been pre- 
sented in the history of religion ; that it is the 
most explicit, the most logical, the most fin- 
ished ; in short, that it is a progression from 
other and lower phases of the same thing, and 
in so far entitled to the respect due to any 
highly advanced organization. 

Passing the outworn superstitions, whether 
of savagery or civilization, and attending to 



TEE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 135 



those forms of belief which are fashionable 
to-day, it will not be disputed that Christian- 
ity is the only one which advances consistent 
hope of personal immortality. The vagueness 
and vagary of Buddhism upon this doctrine 
are too well known to need explanation here. 
The " Dream-religion " may, or may not, make 
you a man or a cloud, at the thither side of 
death ; it is not clear whether one shall be an 
angel or an atom. Much aesthetico-religious 
sensibility which luxuriates over the " Light of 
Asia," would be cured by a sound acquaint- 
ance with the Suttas or Dhammapadas in a 
standard translation. " Never," says Max 
Miiller, " had a scheme of salvation been put 
forth ... so independent of, so even antag- 
onistic to the belief in a soul, the belief in 
God, and the hope of a future life." 

Shall we ask Agnosticism for her eternal 
hope ? Hollow is her evasive reply ! Such 
dreary elusion is not a new one, at best, in the 
history of belief. " When," says Miiller again, 
" after many centuries of thought, a pantheis- 
tic or monotheistic unity has been evolved out 
of the chaos of polytheism . . . there has 
always arisen, at last, a school to whom theo- 



136 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

logical discussions Lave lost their interest, and 
who have sought for a new solution of the 
questions to which the theologies have given 
inconsistent answers, in a new system in 
which man was to work out here on earth his 
own salvation." Up to a certain point Agnos- 
ticism has, indeed, pilfered from Christianity 
in the attempt to substitute for a strong and 
glorious affirmation a weak and pitiful ne- 
gation. So intense is the love of life in the 
human soul that even this negation is pathet- 
ically snatched. He who has no longer any 
hope of existence beyond the incident of his 
own death-bed palliates his condition by prat- 
ing of posterity ; or, he who buries the beloved 
of his life, standing comfortless at the grave's 
gap, listens to feeble talk of her continuance 
in the future of the race. 

The Christian religion, in offering duration 
to the individual, is, as we have said, explicit 
and logical ; but it is also conditional. It is 
difficult for the mind, reared among the fami- 
liar speech with which most of us dispose of 
this subject, to be alertly aware of the fact 
that immortality is nowhere proved to be a 
natural right. Yet such is the fact. Like 



TEE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 137 



suffrage, immortality is not a right, but a pri- 
vilege. It is not property, but a gift. This 
gift is offered to you or me upon conditions 
which we can accept or deny at will. The 
founder of our religion makes, we may say 
that he constitutes, the conditions. Everlast- 
ing life is, in fact, according to this religion, 
bestowed by Jesus Christ upon the human 
soul. The consequence of declining this gift 
and its conditions would seem to be logically, 
if not theologically, wrapped in the phrase, 
" everlasting death." But this opens debat- 
able ground, upon which our paper can do no 
more than glance. 

Theology is not Christianity. The word 
and the creed are not one and the same. The 
premise of the master and the conclusion of 
the priest may diverge through pressure of a 
hundred inevitable causes. 

The writer is no theologian and is not writ- 
ing to theologians, and is loath to touch upon 
a point which laymen must treat rather by in- 
stinct and judgment than by equipment. Yet 
the great common sense and heart of the world 
will have their way with the great common 
problems. The universal must abide the uni- 



138 TEE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

versal test. The question whether any por- 
tion, large or small, of the human race is to 
suffer forever is, at least, one which it would 
seem to be in poor taste to treat flippantly, 
and poor religion to treat acrimoniously. If 
there be any question above all others in which 
people who think as well as feel, or people 
who feel as well as think, should grant each 
other large and solemn charity, this is that 
question. 

It is not a matter to be frivolously set aside, 
either by theological prejudice, or personal 
preference. It is difficult to suppose that the 
eternal future of the mass of the human race 
depends upon the culture of an exegete, or the 
translation of a Greek word. Whatever may 
be the truth, or the choice between the chances 
of the truth, such a choice should be made in 
a spirit above the reproach of controversial 
bitterness or pettiness, and " on the height" 
of a sacred gentleness of soul, wherein "lies 
repose." 

It would be seen by an exegetical study of 
the subject that it may be at least no un- 
scriptural or unreasonable form of Christian 
faith which offers immortality — any kind of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 139 



immortality — as a gift, on specified condi- 
tions, to the individual. To this extent, there- 
fore, Christianity may be called in support of 
the suggestion to which we find ourselves now 
clearly directed by the train of thought that 
we have pursued ; and, in so far, those who are 
themselves believers in the value of the Chris- 
tian faith, and tolerant of its differing inter- 
pretations of the Bible text, may be inclined 
to follow us. For those who are not such, the 
argument stands or falls by itself ; lacking, 
in that case, a certain emphasis, but not, we 
trust, without order. 

" He that belie veth on me," said Jesus 
Christ, " hath everlasting life." " Immortal- 
ity," said Emerson, " will come to such as are 
fit for it. He who would be a great soul in 
the future must be a great soul now." Both 
the religious and the philosophical aspects of 
our thought have their force ; he who accepts 
either has something ; he who holds both has 
much. " Blessed be the day," cries the modern 
Buddhist, " when I shall draw the veil from 
the face of my beloved. . . . But the veil on 
the face of my beloved is the dust of this 
earthly body." " There is a spiritual body," 



140 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

asserted the Christian apostle. " I am the res- 
urrection," said his Master. 

Now, then, it will be remembered that we 
have gone over certain ground in this paper, 
not unfamiliar in itself, but holding, as the 
writer hopes, some fresh relation to contiguous 
territory. We have traced the nature and 
effects of personality as a factor in power. 
We have noticed that the tendency of indi- 
viduality is to vigor, and because to vigor, 
therefore to duration of life. We have re- 
membered that modern science has given us 
proof, so overwhelming as to partake of the 
nature of revelation, of a truth so familiar that 
we had all but overlooked it — the truth that 
man, to the most solemn ends, is born to fight 
for his life. We have recollected that the 
struggle for existence is decided by the ratio 
of individuality to the odds ; that individual- 
ity may be subtle or strong ; that victory 
may be real or apparent ; that individuality is 
likely to become, with the progress of civiliza- 
tion, a more complex fact, in which the rela- 
tion between the seen and the unseen may 
change its present proportions. We have 
called to mind, also, that the love of life is 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 141 



one of the elements of life, and that death 
sets in with the passion, whether real or ap- 
parent, for death. We have remembered that 
the desire for eternal, and therefore unseen, 
life is an important human impulse ; and we 
have alluded to the contributions of Christian 
philosophy toward the love of eternal life es- 
pecially as framed in the theory of conditional 
immortality. We have further suggested that 
the Christian offer of immortality is a progres- 
sion from lower phases of the same thing, and 
entitled to the respect due to any highly ad- 
vanced organization. 

Does it not remain to be said that strength 
of individuality is probably proportional to the 
strife for eternal existence ? Tremendous is 
the truth, if this be true. A man may be neg- 
ligent of his own noblest nature if he deem 
himself the victim of a blind chance, or a re- 
lentless tyrant, or even an arbitrary governor. 
He must start, if he be a man, to a view of 
life and time which puts him on his mettle 
before both. The appeal to self-respect, in 
such a view, is as powerful as self-respect can 
bear. Suppose that this view be true. Sup- 



142 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

pose that the struggle for existence which be- 
gins with the Protozoa, or the Promammalia, 
and advances 1 to Aristotle or Darwin, has 
become nothing more nor less than a struggle 
for immortality. 

Suppose that the challenge is thus broadly 
thrown down to you, or me, or Newton, or the 
Jukes family. Live or die ! It is your own 
affair. You have the conditions and the 
chances. Accept or decline. No gods, pagan 
or Christian, shall interfere to compel you. 
Your personality has sacred and awful rights. 
You are caught in the machinery of inextri- 
cable law. Love is a part of that law; but 
both love and law must take the material that 
you give them. Of what stuff are you made ? 
Abide the test. It is ours to ask. Are you 
a man or a molecule? Are you a soul or 
a cell ? It is yours to decide. Give us the 
proof. 

Truth has endless corridors by which to ap- 
proach conviction, and one can see in such a 

1 We say advances. We cannot say ends ; for we have 
no evolutionist yet returned from the silence of apparent 
end to classify whatever possible superior form of being 
may exist beyond reach of our microscope or telescope. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 143 



view as this, a marked appeal to certain types 
of nature which seem to be left out of the 
usual religious argument. It is perhaps true 
that many a person objects to troubling him- 
self with immortality, either as an advantage 
or a disadvantage, when his attention is con- 
centrated exclusively upon the fact that eter- 
nal life involves definite moral conditions. 
That it should imply, also, certain conditions 
of a very different sort is quite another mat- 
ter; that it should touch the intellect, the 
force, the good sense, or even the simple 
pluck of a man — this is to be regarded. We 
may be conquered through our pride, when we 
cannot be won through our conscience. He 
who does not find it any longer exciting to be 
told that he is not good enough to live for- 
ever, will scarcely hear without interest that 
he is not strong enough. Many of us would 
rather be called bad than weak. It is an ar- 
rest to the thoughtf ulness of any man but an in- 
ferior one to show him reason why he may be 
in the way of losing an obvious gain through 
inferiority. Precisely that, such a view of 
the struggle for immortality as we have sug- 
gested would undertake to show. 



144 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

In proportion to the force and vigor of the 
individual is the love of life, present and to 
come. Eternal life should be at least as 
much a test of power as temporal life. Indi- 
viduality means the acquisition of life; one 
rates one's self accordingly. To love life, to 
strike out for it, to overcome it, to insist on it, 
is strength. To fail of it is weakness. We 
do not stay just now to remind you that a 
pure heart, forgiven sin, consecrated deeds, are 
the conditions of immortality, and that a given 
being may miss of it by missing these ; we say 
only that he misses it because there is not 
enough of him, or because he does not make 
enough of himself to get it. He of the centri- 
fugal nature, w T hose mind works from within 
outward, moving in spirals about moral prob- 
lem s; who finds it easy to doubt accepted 
truths because of what strikes him repeatedly, 
at the same point, as the excess of his own 
originality — he will be reluctant to believe 
that he may be declining immortality simply 
because he is not man enough to have it. Yet, 
metaphysically as physically, the argument 
holds. He is thrust upon a battle-field, enor- 
mous and deadly. As for the bread of the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 



145 



body, so for the bread of the soul, he fights. 
As for life, love, success, fame, and the trifles 
of time, so for eternal hope, and its majes- 
tic possibilities, he shall be challenged. Is he 
a man ? Let him show his colors. Is he a sol- 
dier ? Ask for his scars. Does he hold his 
ground ? Does he shirk, desert, surrender, or 
fly ? Let him look to it. By so much as he 
is a force, he will keep the field. 

Retreat from the great effort of being to 
secure its own continuity, may have whatever 
moral aspects ; it is at least true that to re- 
treat is to be beaten ; that to be beaten is to 
be weak ; and that such weakness may be the 
last fate which has presented itself as probable 
to the type of soul most likely to succumb. 

For, let us notice, the struggle for immor- 
tality is not a simple and obvious affair. The 
armor and sabre, the powder and shot, are not, 
in fact, altogether the urgent and the tangi- 
ble. The blood and dust and mortal cries 
may not be the apparent, or the audible ; and 
he who is hurled down 66 unable or to move or 
die," may give no sign. As with the silent 
defeats of life, so with its dumb victories. He 
needs the higher education in the deaf-mute 



146 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

language of the soul, who would apply his tac- 
tics to the estimate ; and his is the best mar- 
tial culture of the spirit which is most con- 
scious of its own unfitness to specialize that es- 
timate. But so much as this it is easy to see : 
as civilization refines, the intricacy and deli- 
cacy of the struggle for existence must refine 
with it ; and, that this is likely to be true of 
eternal as well as of temporal existence, the 
course of our argument has already suggested, 
and now finds itself obliged to emphasize. 

The struggle for eternal life is no light 
matter, like ladies' calisthenics, which exercise 
only certain muscles. The athletics of the 
soul are virile ; they are impartial ; they are 
not ornamental and fanciful. Development is 
demanded for use, not for exhibit. Tissue and 
sinew and blood and bone respond ; now this, 
now the other, urgency on one, relief of the 
other, pressure here, repose there, strain to-day, 
rest to-morrow, this faculty aroused, the other 
lulled, this feat to be performed, that danger 
scorned, a boy's medal won to-day, and a 
man's life saved next year ; thus the soul, in 
the hands of the Silent Trainer, grows in 
frame and fibre. Will we play battle-door 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 147 

and shuttle-cock for our prizes ? Or close and 
wrestle for them ? 

We have spoken of the evolution of a 
higher than the physical, from the physical 
science which holds so disproportionate, but 
none the less useful, an influence over the 
thought of the instructed world to-day. " We 
are spirits," said one of the coolest of scien- 
tific men, a century ago. " We are spirits. 
That bodies should be lent to us while they 
can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring 
knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow- 
creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of 
God." The practical Franklin showed his 
keen good sense in this matter-of-fact way 
of expressing a truth which is too often ap- 
proached upon the mystical and most difficult 
side. We are, indeed, spirit ; and we may, 
without hesitation, dispute so much as this 
with him who begins by saying that we are 
matter. It cannot be denied that we have at 
least as good a right to start with the one asser- 
tion, as he with the other. " I should never," 
says Elizabeth Peabody, " teach a child, 6 You 
have a soul,' but, ; You have a body.' " 

Let us then call the struggle for immortal- 



148 THE STRUGGLE F OR .IM MORTALITY. 

ity an advanced form of the lower encounter. 
It is a struggle historic and dramatic, as it is 
involved and unconcluded. A man cannot 
fight this fight with part of his nature. It 
takes the whole of him. A stout fist avails 
him little without sound thought. He cannot 
gain the day by his intellect, lest he lose it on 
the side of his heart. Neither does emotion 
win without reflection, and hysteria is a poor 
weapon to substitute for common sense. We 
find at once, that we have approached herein 
a problem complex to the edge of mystery. 
For, there enters into this struggle a strange 
law of spiritual selection, differing from that 
governing the conflicts in the lower phases of 
organization, as fineness differs from momen- 
tum, the telephone from a war-cry, or the 
Flower Charity from the Inquisition. 

The conditions of immortality wholly refuse 
to rest upon the piers which hold the condi- 
tions of conquest in the life of time. Brute 
force ceases now to keep its relative value in 
this larger contest. There is what may be 
called a brute force of the mind, of which this 
is equally and terribly true. Sheer intellect 
has no greater chance at everlasting life than 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 149 



sheer muscle. Immortality is not promised by 
their Creator, to great men. Mere mincl holds 
no passport to eternity. There is no limited 
express to Paradise for able people. Goethe, 
for being Goethe, is none the more likely to 
last forever. Frederica, so far as we can see, 
stands quite as good, or a better chance. 

The law of spiritual selection would seem 
to be at once severe and delicate. The obscur- 
est mother, transmitting a pure heart to her 
boys, never having heard of protoplasm, and 
knowing no philosophy beyond her prayers, 
may enter into this higher contention with an 
equipment which the discoverer of the missing 
link might envy. It is quite conceivable that 
the soul of a felon might survive the soul of a 
prince or a priest. The tests of the world fail. 
Fine causes, and finer sequences, enter the 
list. Who are we that we should win? What 
is our standard of success ? What the temper 
of our weapons ? We buy and sell, we woo 
and wed, we gain us a friend, or fame; and 
the stranger without our gates, or the servant 
under our feet, may be fighting for a soul's 
life where we are fooling with it, and may, 
therefore, be better worth life, and so the more 



150 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

likely to live. For law is but law, and spirit- 
ual law loses nothing of its grip for its gain in 
quality, and holds us none the less robustly be- 
cause of a touch so velvet. 

Suppose that this view be the true one. 
Suppose that he who wishes to live indefi- 
nitely, or always, is the subject of such law. 
Suppose that the complete and complex nature 
— physical, mental, moral, spiritual — be- 
comes, by an ascending scale of strain, the sol- 
dier in such a strife. Suppose that the ulti- 
mate atom of the permanent individual may 
prove to be the vigor or the honor of his con- 
science. Suppose that from this, as, in the 
physical case, from the cell of the embryo, the 
life of what we call a soul evolves. Suppose 
that the development of this spiritual cell-life 
is, to the requisite extent, under the control of 
the human will. Suppose that this develop- 
ment is governed by a just, or even a generous 
relativity to the environment which spiritual 
science is not yet advanced enough to formu- 
late. Suppose that the grandest work per- 
formed by the physical science of our times 
should prove to be its contribution to such a 
spiritual science, and that such a spiritual sei- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 151 



ence is yet to become a matter of more or- 
derly, more manly, and more nearly universal 
acceptance, than any form of religious belief 
detached from natural research is now likely to 
command. Suppose that the revelation of fact 
and the revelation of faith are met together. 
Suppose that the progress of fact does not pro- 
ceed, as Spencer would have it, from evolution 
to dissolution, but from evolution through ap- 
parent dissolution to real evolution ; and that 
the splendid blossom of the greatest discovery 
of modern thought has as yet but begun to 
bud. 

We ask for this aloe, precious and perfect, 
in the name of reason, that it may be rooted 
in the hope of everlasting life, for which it is 
our honorable service to contend. 

We ask for this hope in the name of sci- 
ence, which has rendered unto nature the 
things that are nature's, but unwittingly unto 
God the things that are God's. The glory of 
the law moves on. The higher science has its 
prophets. Its scholars are to come. In an 
age when we are called upon to study " the 
sagacity and morality of plants," we may be 
justified in demanding an adaptation of sci- 



152 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

entific method to the fine fibres and hidden 
seed of the human spirit. 

If these things be so, the mind is dazzled 
by the vision of those future types of which 
both faith and science promise us so much. 
To what refinement and enforcement the high 
organizations of this present life may rise, he 
only can intelligently imagine who has the 
student's lens and the believer's eye. What 
man may be a century or two hence, what the 
average of nature with which he must contend, 
what the ideal by which he shall achieve su- 
periority, what, in short, the intensification of 
his entire form of strife with his conditions, 
it is only possible for us to guess by some 
conception of the fact of spiritual nature, and 
the nature of a science based upon that fact. 
What the select man, survivor of this or the 
future environment, may become in the life 
beyond, to what unimagined evolution he may 
be liable, through what supreme equilibration 
of power incapable of dissolution the rhythm 
of spiritual motion shall sweep him, who can 
say? 

Once again. We have spoken of the love 
of life as one of the constituent elements of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 



153 



life ; and, in this connection, we have ob- 
served that death sets in with the passion for 
death. It is reasonable to suggest that in the 
higher, as in the lower life, the analogy holds. 
In the strife for eternal existence, it may be 
true that the amount of contending desire rep- 
resents the amount of contending power ; that 
the love of eternal life, itself, bespeaks, to an 
extent, the capacity for it ; that the instincts 
or the impulses of belief are not without their 
significance, other things being equal, as sal- 
vable agencies ; in short, that the longing to 
live forever not only carries with it the power 
to conquer the materials of duration, but in- 
dicates in a measure the force of the life-prin- 
ciple in the soul. A man may live forever 
because he loves his eternal life, and he loves 
his eternal life because he is to live forever. 

If, on the other hand, death sets in with the 
passion for death, may there be a significance 
invisible and invincible as a zymotic disease, 
in the reluctance to conquer immortality which 
is sometimes cultivated either as a conscious 
whim, or a supposed sign of mental strength ? 
Hume speaks, somewhere, of a " decline of 
soul." Side by side with what may be almost 



154 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

called devout unbelievers, we find men whose 
skepticism as to spiritual facts is a species of 
new game, a philosophical lawn-tennis, where- 
with to pass life's midsummer; and over against 
these, we find others still, by whom dispute 
with supernaturalism is rated as a synonym 
for force of character, and cultivated as an 
egotism rather than a consecration. May there 
not be among these cases of spiritual suicide ? 
Has he perhaps already begun to die in whom 
the tolerance of death is so indulgently re- 
garded ? Is his life-principle already vitiated 
who can so idly court results which a sound 
and sane soul-vigor should abhor ? " Earnest- 
ness is the path of life," says the Dhamma- 
pada, " Thoughtlessness the path of death. 
Those who are in earnest do not die ; those 
who are thoughtless are as if dead already ! " 

Experts will tell us with what firmness, yet 
with what tenderness, the suicidal impulse is 
treated in hospitals for the insane ; how the 
unnatural passion for death is discouraged by 
exposing its unnaturalness, or by fostering 
the feeble love of life, if that be possible ; how 
gently the nature is aroused against itself; 
how surgically the diseased conditions are 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 155 



handled, and how, upon the chance of the suf- 
ferer's recognizing his pathological position, 
and approaching himself as his own patient, 
all his hope of cure may hang. 

It is by no means impossible that the sui- 
cidal nature of unbelief in a life to come, may 
yet find its soul-physicians in some psycholog- 
ical asylum of the future, wherein these dis- 
eases of the spirit shall be treated by a skill 
which must make our present methods of deal- 
ing with them seem, by contrast, like the 
blood-letting and strait - jacket, the dungeons 
and the chains of the Dark Age. 

But once again : If these things be so, the 
familiar thought (even, as we have already 
seen, the familiar language) of the lower sci- 
ence has been the subject of a solemn uncon- 
scious selection in the service of that higher 
science of the soul to which we look. 

In the struggle for immortality, the position 
of the individual holds a curiously interesting 
attitude toward the elevated nature of his en- 
vironment. What is the insistence of individ- 
uality but the persistence of force ? Or what its 
victory but a conservation of energy ? What 
close economies there may be in spiritual 



156 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

agency, or what Law of Variation in spirit- 
ual inheritance, we know not. What is the 
protoplasm of spirit we can but guess. What 
supernatural selection may be at work upon 
us, we have yet to learn. 

And yet again : Supposing there to be any 
value in these thoughts, they go toward prov- 
ing the doctrine of the survival of the fittest 
a sublime and an inspired thing. If we have 
been thinking in the right direction, that is a 
doctrine which substantiates religious belief 
only less than religious belief substantiates it. 

The revelation of nature and the revelation 
of the Word confirm each other as respects 
this stimulating conception of the human 
problem. The old urgency of faith and the 
new impetus of science move upon the same 
pulley. 

Life is a proof of the power to live. Life 
is a proof of the qualification for life. We 
compete and strive, we yield or conquer, we 
adjust our individuality to our odds, we adjust 
our moral freedom to our individuality, we 
adjust our elemental love of duration to our 
moral freedom, and the lawful result abides. 
The spiritually weakest goes to the wall. The 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 157 

spiritually strongest conquers. He is the unfit 
who is beaten to death on the spiritual side of 
his nature. He is the fit survivor who saves 
his soul alive. 

What manner of man may he be who shall 
be found capable of the final survival ? Honest 
perplexity has its visions, and struggles toward 
them with noble discontent. Believing Chris- 
tianity points to her Nazarene and clings to 
the feet of the sweet and solemn ideal which 
he has carved like a statue in the world. 

Whether we have fixed our eyes upon the 
marble or the dream, the complicated nature 
of the struggle in w r hich we are involved re- 
mains at least the one fact about which there 
can be no dispute. The finer we are, the more 
threads to our destinies. The stronger we are, 
the more strain upon our fibre. That first 
flaw of conduct which weakens our resistant 
power may find no steel fingers like those in 
the machinery of woolen-mills, which detect 
the defective threads and stop the weaving on 
the spot. 

Supernatural selection has what may be 
called an artistic task in dealing with human 
character. The materials of duration may be 



158 THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 

found in mere morality, or a martyr's fate ; 
they may pause at veracity, or fly to aspira- 
tion ; they may be sought in common human- 
ity, or hide in exalted consecration. 

Who shall say how the chance turns? At 
least, plainly, since law is justice, not against 
the paupers of heredity ; not against the poor 
devils of the world as opposed to their betters. 
Noblesse oblige in the aristocracy of nature as 
in that of accident, and the highly-born may 
run the highest risks. 

The man of many excellent qualities who 
protected himself at the expense of a woman 
— the woman of good intentions whose petty 
exactions defrauded a man of his best possibili- 
ties — might be beating the first retreat in the 
long struggle wherein the power of advance 
grows feeble faster than the consciousness of 
feebleness. The jocund entrance into the for- 
est of worldliness, wherein, before we know it, 
the soul has lost the trail — the thin coating 
of social courage which we take for moral 
armor, when it may be only a species of me- 
tallic paint — the rust of selfishness wrought 
by sorrow or disease, and worn like an orna- 
ment by our unconscious vanity — might be 



THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. 159 



the sign of the weakness which should defeat 
us in the ultimate struggle for survival, under 
some tremendous moral emergency, or crushing 
spiritual strain. 

Our self-respect arises like a knight, " with- 
out fear and without reproach," to defend such 
a view of the appeal of human life to human 
strength. Magnificent and terrible that chal- 
lenge ! 

Is a man to be the weak, the worsted, the 
defective of nature ? Is he crippled, maimed, 
unable of soul ? Shall he surrender his chance 
at continuance for some inefficiency of tem- 
perament, or flabbiness of purpose, or lack of 
moral gentility ? Shall he yield to that slight 
tendency to be satisfied with an undertone in 
ideals, which may be the first step toward 
spiritual discord that must resist harmonizing 
unless in finer hands than his ? 

Shall he narcotize the nerve, or loll aw r ay 
the muscularity of a soul that had fitness in 
its power and survival at its bid ? 

All that he hath, will he not give for his 
life? 



V. 



THE CHRISTIANITY .OF CHRIST. 

The special ignorance of the generally edu- 
cated presents a tempting subject for study ; 
it might form the intellectual fad of a wearied 
scholar, with zest to himself and the public. 
There is a certain action of the mind, so swift 
and so easy that it might almost be called the 
toboggan tendency, to slide plump down into 
each recurrent delusion that makes a coasting- 
ground for society ; to pick itself up, find its 
bruises, climb up, and do it all over again with 
undiminished simplicity and ardor. Nowhere 
is this curious inaccuracy of civilized intelli- 
gence more evident than in questions dealing 
with religious interests. We are used to it 
even in the detail of narrative literature. 
When one of the leading authors of America, 
a few years ago, wrote of the " wardens " of 
an orthodox Congregational church, one need 
not care the less for his novels, but one might 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 161 



remember that lie would have found it diffi- 
cult to make an equivalent blunder upon any 
purely secular topic. So far as I know, only 
one reader, a clergyman, ever observed the 
slip. A brother novelist, of the same school, 
antedated the typewriter the other day, in 
a story, and half the critics in the country 
barked. 

The latest illustration of intellectual tobog- 
ganing lies easily in the history of the Russian 
dreamer, whose peculiarities have become the 
aesthetico-religious play-ground of the literary 
world. Tolstoi must allow himself the priv- 
ilege of many a veiled smile at the species of 
attention with which he has been honored. He 
is himself of far too sincere and strenuous a 
nature to comprehend the intellectual games 
for which he has furnished the open field. 
Shortly said, what is it that we have in the 
story of this interesting person and in his re- 
markable influence upon a certain phase of 
thought ? There is given to us a highly-edu- 
cated man with a consecrated conscience ; the 
world has known such before. He has ex- 
pressed views of truth protestant to a velvet- 
and - sealskin religion ; in this particular he 



162 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

does not stand alone. He has developed the 
genius of consistency; in this respect he is 
remarkable, but not original. He has tried 
to live the life of a Christian theorist ; in this 
regard he is to be reverenced ; he is not 
unique. 

The attempt to imitate the life of Christ is 
a very old experiment. It began in the del- 
icate nature of that preferred disciple whom 
we are told in literature older than " My Re- 
ligion " that the Founder of our religion 
" loved." A classic which critical culture has 
been accustomed to regard as not inferior to 
" Anna Karenina," some time since familiar- 
ized the world with principles which it might 
have missed, had it waited until such date as 
presented Count Leo Tolstoi's rising genius to 
the approval of American critics. 

Tolstoi is an earnest, intellectual man. He 
has written good books. He has lived a good 
life. He makes it his daily business to live a 
better. He has both the head and the heart 
to appreciate the supreme value of the per- 
sonality of Jesus Christ, and he has the inde- 
pendence to pursue his own interpretation of 
that transcendent life in his own way. For 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 163 



this he is to be admired and respected — to be 
studied, if you like. He is the latest prom- 
inent specimen of a clean departure from the 
trite in faith. 

But any educated Christian knows that the 
history of his belief presents examples of 
courage as devout, of self-sacrifice as fine, of 
consecration as stimulating, of life as Christ- 
like. We are not sure that it would be im- 
possible to find instances of interpretative 
vigor in the application of Christianity to 
affairs as worthy the attention of the realistic 
school of fiction. Even in flitting from one 
sentence to another, the mind carries flash- 
light pictures of dedicated lives dear to Chris- 
tian memory. We see the soul of Luther dar- 
ing the world — " Here I stand. I cannot 
otherwise. God help me. Amen " ; Frederick 
Robertson, popular preacher of a fashionable 
church in which the undergraduates of Oxford 
stood packed to hear him, walking the streets 
by night, a sick, a dying man, to save the 
fallen women of Brighton ; Dorothea Triidel, 
healing the sick of Switzerland with no ma- 
teria medica but that of a consecrated life and 
awful prayer; Elizabeth Frye, " visiting" her 



164 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

Master "in prison," and Christianizing the 
penal system of the world. We recall those 
select spirits who, at any cost, stood pledged 
to protect the fugitive slave of our own coun- 
try, presenting himself with the historic pass- 
word, u I was a stranger, and ye took me in." 
We speak below our breath with reverence 
the name of Father Damien, that Christian 
priest who elected to take up his abode upon 
the leper-island of the Sandwich group, and 
there, a leper, died. We see with blinding 
eyes obscure homes that we have known, in 
which are the saintly sick, the voluntary poor, 
the neighborhood nurse ; men and women who 
do not know worldly ambition when they look 
at it ; who have consumed life in an unre- 
corded passion of self-sacrifice that shames our 
parlors, that shames our libraries, that shames 
our pillows, that shames our literature, and 
that shames our pulpits "for Christ's sake, 
Amen." 

Now this Russian enthusiast, who flits from 
a shoemaker's bench to the manuscripts of 
his novels, may be far above most of us in 
his theory and practice of personal holiness ; 
this does not affect the circumstance that his 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 165 



standard has been equaled or excelled by bet- 
ter Christians than we are, and that the kind 
of religious deference which he has excited 
upon the part of literary criticism is in fact 
the result of imperfectly-trained vision. It is 
really nothing more than deficient education 
which has put this heavy emphasis upon the 
Sclavic idealist. We are not often reminded, 
but we cannot remember too often, that our 
critics, as a class, are not religious men, and 
that facts familiar to many minds of other- 
wise less general culture than the litterateur 
is supposed to possess, may easily be found 
out of his orbit. At the death of M. Leon 
Gozlan, no member of his family could tell 
whether he had professed the Jewish or the 
Christian religion, although he had written 
twenty volumes and fifteen comedies, and had 
edited ten newspapers. The specific ignorance 
of the irreligious intellect is natural ; it is 
almost inevitable. Our culture follows the 
line of our sympathies. A mistake now and 
then is to be expected. What is called the 
faith of the higher life has not failed to find 
disciples in intellectual circles which have wel- 
comed as " some new thing " the enthusiasm 



166 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

older than Madame Guyon, as old as the first 
Oriental dreamer who concentrated his being 
upon the mystic OM, or projected his willing 
soul toward Nirvana. There is something 
very suggestive in the tendency of a certain 
class of educated minds to find religious in- 
spiration anywhere except in the forms ac- 
cepted by the mass of Christian believers. In 
our day, spiritualism has found amazing vic- 
tims — not of the unlearned ; theosophy, in- 
credible adherents — not of the ignorant. It 
has proved more interesting that Koot Hoomi 
should appear in mid-ocean with a letter from 
India, than that Paul should be caught into 
the third heaven. Many a mind has gone rev- 
erently mad over Mozoomdar, which found no 
spiritual impetus in the Gospel of John. A 
man in New York capped the climax by sac- 
rificing an ox to Jupiter in his back-parlor. 

Now, it seems to us that the Tolstoi mania 
is, in part, another form of the same tendency. 
Canon Farrar has so well pointed out, in an 
earlier number of the " Forum," the antiquity 
of the Tolstoian experiment, that nothing re- 
mains to be said by way of historical foot-note 
upon that point. Our Russian noble is a 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 167 

noble Russian, but he is not the originator 
of the faith. He may be even a little of a 
u crank " in certain particulars, though that 
is an accusation so common to the history of 
an audacious soul that one dare not make it 
flippantly. But this goes for nothing when 
realism turns its microscope upon him. The 
amount of it all seems to be that Tolstoi has 
simply, for the time, made religion fashion- 
able. He has given belief prestige. One 
would suppose that he had discovered the 
Founder of the Christian religion. He has 
bestowed eclat upon the message of God to 
the world. He has revived an ancient and 
neglected publication. He has put the New 
Testament upon editorial tables. He has made 
the Saviour of mankind so " realistic " that 
art can afford to recognize him. He has, in 
short, introduced Jesus Christ to exclusive lit- 
erary circles. 

Some months since, snow fell in Charleston, 
South Carolina. A few faint flakes trembled 
down like falling stars. They were said to be 
the first for twenty years. Alert young eyes 
looked at them for the first time in their lives. 
Men ran out into the streets and caught the 



168 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

melting wonder on their coat-sleeves, on their 
hands ; they called to each other and exhibited 
the marvel excitedly. Aged shop-keepers came 
out of their doors and snatched at specimens. 
There may have been fifty flakes. The beauti- 
ful rime was the wonder of the moment and 
melted with it. A literary view of Christ is 
a passing play. It is phenomenal like the 
snow-flake of the South. It drops into grace- 
ful hands outstretched for the last fine fancy ; 
it is overturned in them, and studied, and pret- 
tily discussed — and melts in them to make 
room for the next highly-crystallized wonder. 

When we come to the heart of the matter, 
it is not " Launcelot nor another " that is in 
question. It occurs to us in the course of time 
that Tolstoi is not the Redeemer of the world 
and Mr. Howells his prophet. Show us the 
Greek scholar who takes his Plato in transla- 
tion, and we show you the Christian who takes 
his Christ at second-hand. After all, it is the 
superb directness of Tolstoi which has given 
such passing importance to his views. Some- 
body in the world usually recognizes an honest 
man. It is always interesting to be straight- 
forward. The Russian has gone sharp to the 



HIE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 169 



mark. He read his Christ in the original. 
In our day this practice is out of date. When 
we have done as much, we may be equipped 
so far as to become counselors-at-la\v of the 
Christian faith. Until we have, any fanatic 
who has, may be our superior in the practical 
graces of Christianity. It is possible that the 
Lord would not now require a wealthy fol- 
lower to make shoes, and seclude that amount 
of trade from the shoemaker ; but the disci- 
ple who does it " in his name," is by simple 
virtue of the beautiful logic of self-denial an 
attorney for the truth who goes far to win the 
case. A man may swallow the Nicene Creed, 
and digest the Thirty-nine Articles, but not 
be fit to black the last boot made by the ama- 
teur shoemaker who has swept the " chord of 
self in music out of sight," in the ardent 
struggle to discover what Jesus Christ really 
meant by the world and what it is the world's 
duty to do about it. Making every allowance 
for the proportion of delusion or alienated 
good sense in Tolstoi, he is probably closer 
than most of us to the principles of Chris- 
tianity. His sincerity, his simplicity and 
unselfishness, penetrated by his commanding 



170 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

intelligence, have done spiritual service with 
which his renewal of an ancient interpretative 
experiment was in useful harmony. His is a 
consecrated intelligence. The world never fails 
to respond to that. 

Meanwhile, there is no doubt about it, we 
are pitiably muddled about the whole Chris- 
tian idea. The religion of Jesus has devas- 
tated itself with practical blunders enough to 
have destroyed a less robust faith or one of 
lower origin. We may paraphrase the cele- 
brated cry of Madame Roland : " Oh Chris- 
tianity ! Christianity ! How many crimes are 
committed in thy name ! " The central figure 
of human history, the Galilean has founded a 
faith upon which he distinctly urges that the 
survival of the soul depends. Yet, after two 
thousand years of Christian culture, our practi- 
cal results are not unlike the Russian peasant's 
view of the Trinity — " The Saviour, Mother 
of God, and St. Nicholas." Considered as the 
disciples of a religion representing the awful 
claim of Christianity, we are surprisingly dis- 
integrated by those vagaries and weaknesses 
which defeat unity and organization. We are 
corroded by worldliness of heart. We are im- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 171 

prisoned in narrowness of intellect. We are 
disgraced by a defective humanity. 

The essential principles of Jesus Christ 
seem to be reduced to three. The first of 
these is the imperious demand for a personal 
consecration to right, so select, so severe, so 
lofty, and so sustained that it is to be com- 
prehended only through achievement. Far 
beyond our brightest fact we see it shining in 
a dazzling mist, as one sees the outline of the 
Celestial City in that old engraving setting 
forth the course of Bunyan's Pilgrim — the 
one supreme ideal of the earth. Who was 
Christ ? A carpenter become a rabbi — what 
we should call a " self - made " itinerant 
preacher. What has he done? Guided the 
conscience and created the hope of the w r orld. 
How did he do it ? By personal holiness noth- 
ing less than awful. To study this highly- 
sensitized nature even as an intellectual ex- 
ercise, for an hour, is to breathe rarefied air. 
We descend from it, panting, as one does from 
a great poem or a mountain. What would be 
the effect of a thorough moral assimilation of 
this delicate atmosphere ? What refinement of 



172 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

the sensibility ! What nutrition of the soul ! 
What sacred fire to the brain ! What spiritual 
courtliness to the conduct ! 

What do Christian believers undertake ? 
Simply the imitation of the most intense life 
the world has known. An acute absorption 
in the process would seem to be logically nec- 
essary. Most of us go about it as we go to a 
matinee where the programme is too familiar. 
What does the Founder of our religion de- 
mand ? Absolutely, the surrender of personal 
preference to his theory of life. Yet the last 
thing which we seem likely to do is to agree 
upon his theory. Whatever else it is not, it 
is at least, beyond dispute, a theory of breath- 
less self-sacrifice. One of the greatest Pagans 
of our day has said : " What I look to, is the 
time when the impulse to help our fellows 
shall be as immediate and as irresistible as 
that which I feel to grasp something if I am 
falling." In such a conception of life, call it 
by what name we will, " Jesus of Nazareth 
passeth by." The Christian doctrine is in 
many cases most vividly expressed by an out- 
sider, perhaps because he takes a fresher view 
of it. A sensible religious writer has put it 
in this way : — 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 173 

" The Christian law is the law of love. Whoever 
puts the rules of art above the law of love is a 
Pagan. He who habitually seeks to gratify his 
own tastes rather than to do good to all men as he 
has opportunity, is not a Christian but a Pagan." 

Now, whatever else he was or was not, and 
whatever he meant or did not mean, Jesus 
Christ was essentially an unworldly man. The 
question is not, Are we all to become evangel- 
ists, and pool our property, and allow our- 
selves to be thrashed by bullies ? Shall Beacon 
Street adopt the table manners of Caper- 
naum ? Shall the talUJi of Palestine be made 
the fashion in the New England climate ? 
The question is, What would the Founder of 
our faith do in our situation ? Have we got at 
the sense of it ? Have we applied Christian- 
ity? Have we made a science of the divine 
art whose principles he impersonated ? Have 
we the genius of self-sacrifice ? Have we the 
passion of unworldliness ? 

There is a fruit-market in Boston which has 
existed for thirty years upon the whims of the 
rich. Hamburg grapes at ten dollars a pound 
are regularly in stock. In the winter, straw- 
berries and asparagus sell easily at three dol- 



174 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 



lars a box or a bunch. When the first Florida 
berries come, thirteen in a cup, at four dollars 
a cup, parties are supplied. One hundred and 
twenty-five dollars' worth of fruit to a single 
order causes the dealer no surprise. 

A Chinese vase of sang de boeuf finds a 
purchaser comfortably at five thousand dol- 
lars. The famous peach-blow vase was sold 
for fourteen thousand. A mantelpiece costing 
five thousand dollars is no startling feature 
in our homes. The catalogue price of Ivan- 
Romanoff, the Siberian wolf-hound, in the last 
New York dog-show, was ten thousand dol- 
lars. A horse sold the other day for fifty 
thousand, and a distinguished philanthropist 
pronounced him " cheap at that." There is 
a single stone slab valued at forty thousand 
dollars, laid in front of a well-known private 
dwelling in New York. It is no uncommon 
thing to give fifty thousand dollars for a rac- 
ing-yacht ; the average cost of repairs or im- 
provements on such a boat, while in dock be- 
tween regattas, would maintain an economical 
family for a year. One thousand dollars a 
week for the support of a cruising-boat is a 
familiar figure. Twenty thousand dollars for 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 175 



a woman's dress is not an unknown price. 
The jewelry of our ladies has reached such 
value that they dare not wear their gems ; 
such pricelessness is sewn into invisible seams 
that female fashion on a summer tour is a 
temptation to a train wrecker. It is a well- 
known fact that many families have aban- 
doned the use of their silver, which finds a 
lodging in a safe deposit vault, while the din- 
ner-table is decorated, and the burglar defied, 
with plated ware. It is perfectly understood 
that paste rests upon fair bosoms, while the 
diamond glitters at the banker's. Some years 
since it was found that the expenditure for 
the maintenance of the royal stables exceeded 
the entire sum set apart for public education 
in Great Britain. The Bishop of Manchester 
once read to his congregation the following 
passage, saying that he had received it from 
a young lady who wished to know what time 
there was in her life for Christian work : — 

" We breakfast about ten. Breakfast occupies 
the best part of an hour, during which we read our 
letters and pick up the latest news in the papers. 
After that we have to go and answer our letters, 
and my mother expects me to write her notes of 



176 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

invitation or to reply to such. Then I have to go 
into the conservatory and feed the canaries and 
parrots, and cat off the dead leaves and faded 
flowers from the plants. Then it is time to dress 
for lunch, and at two o'clock we lunch. At three 
my mother likes me to go with her when she makes 
her calls, and we then come home to a five-o'clock 
tea, when some friends drop in. After that we get 
ready to take our drive in the park, and then we go 
home to dinner ; and after dinner we go to the 
theatre or the opera ; and then when we get home 
I am so dreadfully tired that I don't know what 
to do." 

" It 's not the rents I look to," said the 
undertaker-landlord of a wretched tenement 
block in London to Octavia Hill; "it's the 
deaths I get out of the houses." Some years 
ago fashionable New York did penance by a 
spurt of charity in the then famous case of 
James Howard, an industrious, sober, honest 
American, who threw a stone into a plumber's 
window, and stole a few brass faucets to buy 
bread for children who were starving, and for 
a wife dying of consumption. For a few 
days the unsavory street where he lived glit- 
tered with liveried carriages, whose occupants 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 177 



amused themselves by playing My Lady Boun- 
tiful to that astounded family, and then rolled 
away to the next new scene in the private 
theatricals of gay life. 

In a New England town the other day, a 
newsboy, hardly higher than the platform, was 
run over by a horse - car and fatally hurt. 
What did this self-supporting baby of six 
years, when writhing in the last agonies of a 
terrible death ? He called piteously for his 
mother. To shriek upon her breast ? That she 
might clasp him while the surgeon worked ? 
To give her his day's earnings. " I 've saved 
'em mother," he cried. "I 've saved 'em all. 
Here they are." When his little clenched, 
dirty hand fell rigid, it was found to contain 
four cents. . 

The city of Detroit may yet remember the 
case of " Gertie," which touched the press of 
the country at the time. A passer through 
Clinton Street one day observed a little Irish 
boy hiding in a door-way and crying. A sym- 
pathetic inquiry brought to light one of the 
most exquisite stories ever recorded of the sick 
poor. In a wretched cellar a little girl of ten 
lay very ill. The window-panes were broken 



178 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

(it was March, by the way) and variously 
stuffed. For one pane the supply of tenement 
upholstery had given out. The wind and the 
boys looked in easily. Just within range of 
curious eyes the cot of the sick child was 
stretched. The gamins of Clinton Street dis- 
covered her plight. One little fellow dropped 
an orange through the broken glass ; a plain- 
tive voice thanked the unseen giver gratefully. 
This touching mercy became the fashion in 
that poor neighborhood. Every day saw the 
cubs of the street cuddling like cossets outside 
that window. Wisps of evergreen swept out 
of florists' doors, broken flowers thrown away, 
offerings of fruit with the decayed part cut 
out — every delicacy for the sick that the re- 
sources of Clinton Street admitted of, went 
through that broken pane. One little fellow 
begged a bunch of frozen Malaga grapes from 
a dealer, to whom he offered his ragged cap 
in payment. One day the boys said, "Our 
Gertie is dead," and the Christian street-boys 
became the mourners behind the hearse of the 
starved and frozen child. 

Now, can any of us dare to say that a state 
of civilization in which such things are not 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 179 



only possible, but in which such extremes of 
human ease and misery are tolerated as the 
necessary conditions of society, represents the 
Christianity of Christ ? Says Isaac Taylor : — 

" To insure its large purpose of good - will to 
man, the law of Christ spreads out its claims very 
far beyond the circle of mere pity or natural kind- 
ness, and in absolute and peremptory terms de- 
mands for the use of the poor, the ignorant, the 
wretched — and demands from every one who 
names the name of Christ — the whole residue of 
talents, wealth, time that may remain after primary 
claims have been satisfied." 

I do not forget that we are thought to be 
the most charitable people on the face of the 
earth. I do not forget the vast machinery of 
our public relief and the reputable organiza- 
tion of our church benevolence, nor the dew 
of our private mercies ; but, taking us at our 
highest, and our attempts to live the un- 
worldly life at their strongest, and the entire 
pitiful result at its best, I wonder that the 
Lord of the Christian religion does not whip 
us out of our bric-a-brac lives, and the whole 
temple of humanity that we have degraded, 
with the fine lash of his holy scorn. 



180 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

Next to the personal consecration of Christ, 
we come upon the fundamental principle of 
his superb liberality. It would be incredible, 
if it were not so familiar a fact as to give a 
trite thought, that the followers of this gen- 
erous-hearted Leader should have squarely 
turned their backs upon his precept and per- 
formance in this regard. Bigotry may be 
called the ecclesiastical vice, as worldliness is 
the personal one of the Christian cultus. Shel- 
ley and Leigh Hunt, talking together once, 
in their light, literary way, made this mem- 
orable concession to Christianity : " What 
might not this religion do, if it relied on char- 
ity, not on creed ? " The worst of it is, that 
the progress of time, which, after all, does 
something for most of us in most respects, 
does not seem to have advanced us radically 
in this. The Inquisition changes its basis, 
that is all. A child inquired with terror, 
on first hearing of the Andover controversy, 
" Are they heretics, Mamma ? Will they be 
burned ? " For the rack and the molten Vir- 
gin, we have the ordination service and the 
examination before the Board of Commis- 
sioners for Foreign Missions. The torture by 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 181 



insomnia has only taken on a finer phase. A 
good man who is not sure that the Bible in- 
sists upon belief in everlasting damnation as a 
condition of reliable character, is pronounced 
unfit to teach to cannibals the elements of 
Christian courtesy. There is no doubt that 
young men of the finest dedication and most 
original disposition of thought are warned out 
of our pulpits to-day by the theological tor- 
ture-chamber through which a virile conscience 
must pass before the authority of the church 
is laid upon the longing to preach the gospel 
of love to men. Robert Ingersoll is the direct 
descendant of the Westminster Confession. 
" Brethren," cried Cromwell to the framers of 
that moral rack, " I beseech you in the bowels 
of the Lord, believe it possible that you may 
be mistaken ! " 

In a Southern town known to the writer, 
seven churches of different sects exist. Not 
one is able to support a pastor. Itinerants of 
different denominations visit this interesting 
and typical place by turns. One Sunday you 
have Hobson's choice of your Methodist ; the 
next you must play Lutheran; and so on. 
The whole village turns out, and prays ac- 



182 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

cordingly. The days of worship are known 
as Baptist Sunday, or Orthodox Sunday, or 
Universalist Sunday, or whatever it may be. 
" But when," asked a visitor to this extraor- 
dinary people, " when is the Lord's Day ? " 

A stranger happening in at Dean Stanley's 
service came away once saying: "I went to 
learn the way to heaven ; I was told the way 
to Palestine." The case is similar with us in 
this wise. Many and dreary are the times 
that we go to the religion of our day to learn 
the way to heaven, and we are taught the way 
to a creed. We go panting with spiritual 
\ thirst and aching with spiritual hunger ; we 

are fed with theological stones. We go long- 
ing for peace ; we find a sword. We go in 
search of a divine Master ; we get the evan- 
gelical council. We seek the holy and the 
humble instruction that trains a soul for the 
sacred diploma of the religious teacher ; we 
find a lawsuit. We seek the cross of Christ ; 
we find the Supreme Court. 

It is a well-known fact that ardent workers 
in the temperance movement find the grog- 
shops and the churches their chief obstacles. 
You soon learn to count the liquor-dealer and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 183 



the communicant almost equally out of rank 
with you in your solitary battle. You must 
bring your drunkard to the vestry, or he may 
as well go drink. You must save your " re- 
formed man " in the denomination, or you 
may collect your library and piano for the 
club-room — as very likely you will — from 
the impenitent world. I was once present at 
a touching scene where the sacrament of the 
Lord's Supper was administered in the pres- 
ence of a crowd of fallen men, struggling for 
a new life. These poor fellows could not have 
borne so much as the odor of the sacred wine ; 
it would have set their bodies and souls on 
fire. Pure water filled the nicked-plated tank- 
ard of the communion service. The bread 
and the water of life were blessed before the 
wistful gaze of these reverent castaways. The 
clergyman officiating, an old man who had 
dedicated his age to the temperance work, and 
a dozen poor, obscure, unflocked church-mem- 
bers in the communicants' seats, were the only 
representatives of the church of Christ pres- 
ent at a scene which was a matter of intense 
public interest in the city, and of severe eccle- 
siastical blame to the temperance people. 



184 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

It is amazing that we should even have to 
remind ourselves that with all this dead-line 
of religious respectability the Founder of our 
faith had no more to do than he had with 
the moral example of Herod. Christ was the 
come-outer of the day. He was the Protest- 
ant ; he was the Liberal ; he was the victim 
of spiritual independence. His was the faith 
that rises 

" Just to scorn the consequence, 
And just to do the thing." 

His teaching was one thrilling protest against 
ecclesiasticism. His life was one pathetic plea 
for religious freedom. Love thy God and thy 
neighbor, and follow me; his command and 
our duty are in those few and simple words. 
He cut down doctrinism and dogmatism as a 
mower cuts down thistles. In his insistence 
on practical holiness there was no room for 
chatter about creeds. He gave himself to God 
and to miserable men. This fervent young 
rabbi had no time to formulate a " Shorter 
Catechism." 

Fancy, for the nonce, our Lord appointed 
chairman of the examining committee of a 
heresy-hunting church to-day. One imagines 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 185 



the eloquent silence with which he would sit 
out the accepted tests of fitness for member- 
ship in his visible church. What does the 
candidate believe concerning the total deprav- 
ity of all mankind ? Is he aware that he com- 
mitted the sin of Adam ? What are his views 
upon the eternal damnation of the finally im- 
penitent ? Has he faith in the sanctity of im- 
mersion? Does he accept the sacrament of 
infant sprinkling? Test his knowledge of the 
Trinity. Try his theory of the nature and 
office of the Holy Ghost. Is he sound upon 
the doctrine of election ? Does he totter upon 
justification by faith ? 

Now conceive it to be the turn of the mute 
presiding Officer to put questions to the can- 
didate. One may imagine that the test-ques- 
tions for religious character would now take a 
surprising turn. Have you a pure heart ? 
Do you love the Lord your God with the 
whole of it ? Explain to us your relation with 
your neighbors. Are you beloved in your 
home? Can you control your temper? Do 
you talk scandal? Are you familiar with 
the condition of the poor ? What are your 
methods of relieving it? Can you happily 



186 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

give disagreeable service to the sick? How 
do you bear physical suffering when it falls 
to your own lot ? How many drunkards have 
you tried to reform ? What outcasts have you 
sought to save ? What mourners have you 
comforted ? On what social theory do you in- 
vite guests to your house ? What proportion 
of your income do you give to the needs of 
others ? What do you understand by prayer 
to God ? What is your idea of a Christ-like 
life? 

The third vital characteristic of the Chris- 
tianity of Christ plainly consists in his unspar- 
ing and unswerving democracy. It is not pos- 
sible to put too great an emphasis upon this 
fixed and terribly-neglected truth. We say 
in glib familiar phrase that the basis of Chris- 
tianity is the brotherhood of humanity — what 
has been usefully called the " enthusiasm of hu- 
manity." Not one in twenty of us realizes that 
this means an ideal of daily life as far above 
our own as the centre of the solar system is 
above the level of the sea. Which of us gives 
the recognition of imitation to the astonishing 
example of Jesus in this regard? Christ was 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST, 187 



the educated and sanctified socialist. He was 
the consistent democrat. He was the conse- 
crated agitator. Social rank simply did not 
exist for him. Caste he scorned. A fisherman 
was his most intimate friend. He accepted 
the hospitality of an ostracized man. He con- 
versed fearlessly and naturally with abandoned 
women. He did not refuse to penitent out- 
casts the preciousness of his personal friend- 
ship. He was never known to shrink from 
foul diseases. Vulgar natures he treated with 
the patience of high refinement. The " com- 
mon people " loved him. He denounced the 
fashionable shams of his times with the non- 
chalance of an emperor and the intelligence 
of an artisan. He scathed the petty preten- 
sions of the leaders of society with that in- 
difference to criticism characteristic of high 
birth, and that sympathy with what we call 
the " lower classes " incident to a personal ex- 
perience of poverty. His social theories held 
the relentlessness of love. There is no polite 
way of evading them. There is no well-bred 
opportunity of ignoring them. The Chris- 
tianity of Christ must meet them point-blank. 
They are its essential test. They are its first 



188 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 

and final demand. Malthus has reminded us 
that the histories of mankind which we possess 
are, in general, only histories of the higher 
classes. Authentic Christianity must be a 
history of the masses. Socially considered, a 
Christian must be, in a sense, interestingly 
varied from the old theological one, " born 
again." He has new kin, he makes new neigh- 
bors, he incurs new social obligations, he read- 
justs his position in human society, or he 
might as well go call himself a Druid. 

The fashionable church has received its full 
share of derision, from critics who may not be 
worthy of a back seat iu it ; but that does not 
affect the fact that it deserves all it gets. The 
recent popular attack upon the pew-rental sys- 
tem may not be made altogether from a de- 
vout point of view ; none the less it will do 
good. Sexton Williams has let fly a fiery- 
winged truth ; and the girl - reporter who 
found herself welcomed by only five New York 
churches, although employed in the service of 
the newspapers rather than of the Lord, has 
put her shabbily-gloved finger upon the spot 
where the tuberculosis of our religious system 
sets in. It is the undecorated fact, that if 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 189 



Jesus Christ were to enter almost any of our 
influential churches to-day he would be shown 
into the back gallery ; and he could not obtain 
admission to our parlors without a letter of 
introduction from some person in our " set." 
" You will find," says a nice observer, "that 
so far as people are reached by religious wor- 
ship outside of their especial religious belief, 
it is the social recognition which has won 
them." 

In a luxurious home, whose invitations are 
not declined, whose hospitality is familiar to 
many distinguished men and women of our 
land, there may be found, any day, mingled 
with the most gifted guests, plain, poor, ob- 
scure people, quite unknown in " society." I 
once saw, at a breakfast at this house, the 
foremost poet in the country seated beside a 
massage rubber, a poor girl training herself 
for the practice of medicine, and in need of 
two things — a good breakfast and a glimpse 
into the cultivated world. She had both, in 
the Lord's name, in that Christian home. Yet 
the spirit of that ideal hospitality is so rare 
that we tell of it as we do of heroic deeds. 
The Christianity of Christ would make it so 



190 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

common that we should notice it only as we do 
the sunrise. 

There does not exist outside of the New 
Testament such a conception of the Christian 
spirit as the great Frenchman (not distin- 
guished for ecclesiastical views of God, but ex- 
iled for his practical love of man) gave us in 
the greatest work of fiction since Shakespeare. 
Who forgets the Bishop in " Les Miserables," 
immortal because he acted like Christ? His 
palace was converted into a hospital, his in- 
come expended for the suffering. Out of the 
luxuries of his highly civilized past, the " spir- 
itual man of the world " (as Margaret Fuller 
would put it) had saved an elegant toilet-case, 
a few silver plates, and silver candlesticks. 
" Knock there" said the citizen to the ex- 
galley-slave whom no other roof would shelter. 

" The Bishop touched his hand gently, and 
said : — 

" ' You need not tell me who you are. This is 
not my house ; it is the house of Christ. It does 
not ask any comer whether he has a name, but 
whether he has an affliction.' " 



In all uninspired literature what is finer 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 191 



than the scene between the Bishop and Val- 
jean, when the gendarmes bring the arrested 
guest and silver back to this threshold of su- 
perhuman hospitality. 

" ' Ah, there you are ! ' said Monseigneur ; 4 1 am 
glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks 
also, which are silver like the rest and would bring 
you two hundred francs. Why did you not take 
them along with your plate ? ? " 

Left alone with the astounded thief, the 
Christian idealist grew stern and solemn : — 

" ' Never forget that you have promised me to 
use this silver to become an honest man. . . . Jean 
Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil 
but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for 
you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from 
the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God ! ' " 

The child of such a spiritual god-father, 
who wonders that Jean Valjean, the galley 
slave, becomes Mayor Madeleine, the saint of 
a district, and the protector of every despised 
and rejected creature in it ? It is thus that 
the Christianity of Christ ought to be spir- 
itually inherited. The idea cultivated by the 
liturgic church, that the laying-on of apostolic 



192 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

hands creates an ancestry of priestly power, 
is a pleasant fancy, pale beside what might be 
the tremendous facts of moral heredity in the 
Christian life. The possibilities of culture in 
this direction are unfathomed. Said Daniel 
Webster, in his private confession of faith : — 

" I believe that the experiments and subtleties of 
human wisdom are more likely to obscure than to 
enlighten the revealed will of God, and that he is 
the most accomplished scholar who has been edu- 
cated at the feet of Jesus, and in the College of 
Fishermen." 

When all is said, it comes to this : Type, 
not argument, governs men ; and the Christ- 
type will control the world just as soon as and 
no sooner than it is consistent, simple, ardent, 
and sincere. Christianity cannot expect to 
become a science on inattention which would 
destroy the perfection of a phonograph, nor 
to conquer society by a series of " bolting " 
experiments which would defeat any political 
party known to civilized nations. Common 
sense holds the balance of power in religion as 
much as it does in affairs. There is what we 
may call a common spirituality, to which hu- 
man respect always defers. The Christianity 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 193 



of Christ necessitates a personal consecration 
fanned to a white-heat that burns to ashes all 
the ordinary standards of conduct ; involves a 
religious toleration " all love, and of love all 
worthy ; " requires an estimate of social val- 
ues absolutely revolutionary to our accepted 
models. 

The time can come, and if it can, it must, 
when the New Testament shall be intelligently 
adapted to the twentieth century. The time 
must come, and if it must, it can, when spir- 
itual caste shall be the only basis of social 
rank. If Christ's life means anything, this 
is inevitable. The imagination falters before 
the progress of a consecrated sociology. It 
would be an interesting science to a cynic, and 
fascinating to an enthusiast. " The night is 
far spent, O householders," said Gautama; 
" it is time for you to do what you deem 
most fit." 

It has been well said that all problems re- 
solve themselves into the problem of personal 
righteousness. The key to our perplexities 
lies no further than a devout and dedicated 
heart. The life of the Nazarene will bewilder 
society with astigmatic optical interpretations 



194 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST. 

not an hour beyond the time when we bring 
to bear upon it the lens of a public purity that 
shuts out private difference or default ; as for- 
eign war called from the bickering Hellenes 
" Greek curses to Persia 59 and " Greek tears 
to Athens." 

Outside of touching individual exceptions, 
which prove the rule with a kind of divine 
silence and shame like that in which our 
Master wrote with his finger on the ground in 
the presence of the erring woman, the Chris- 
tianity of Christ is an unachieved ideal ; but 
it is as practicable as that of truth or honor. 
And, after all, it is one of our " literary 
class " who has put the whole argument for 
us in these reverberating words : — 

" If Jesus Christ is a man, 
And only a man, I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to him ? 
And to him will cleave alway. 

* c If Jesus Christ is a God, 
And the only God, I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air ! " 



VI. 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

In February, 1882, there was organized in 
London a society which had what one is half 
tempted to call the opportunity of the cen- 
tury in its hands. In these days, — when the 
multiple power of the unit has reached a point 
of social infliction which makes every fresh 
combination of human beings an object of 
dread, if not of suspicion ; when the well-in- 
structed citizen adds to his litany : " Deliver 
us from associations, and lead us not into 
committees ! " when people who draw up a 
constitution and by-laws, for any purpose 
whatever, must show their charter, or stand 
back in the name of over-organized humanity, 
— it is much to say of any newly associated 
effort that its final cause seems so adequate as 
that of the Society for Psychical Research. 
The prospectus of this society says : — 
" It has been widely felt that the present is an 



196 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

opportune time for making an organized and sys- 
tematic attempt to investigate that large group of 
debatable phenomena designated by such terms as 
mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic. From the re- 
corded testimony of many competent witnesses, past 
and present, including observations recently made 
by scientific men of eminence in various countries, 
there appears to be, amidst much illusion and de- 
ception, an important body of remarkable phe- 
nomena, which are primd facie inexplicable on 
any generally recognized hypothesis, and which, if 
incontestably established, would be of the highest 
possible value." 

It is not necessary to quarrel with the as- 
sertion of the well-known and well-informed 
gentlemen who stand sponsors for this society, 
when they proceed to say that 

" The task of examining such residual phenom- 
ena has often been undertaken by individual effort, 
but never hitherto by a scientific society organized 
on a sufficiently broad basis." 

When the greatest intellectual discovery of 
our times was made, it was wrought out of the 
inductive method, inch by inch, laboriously, 
consistently, and triumphantly. The theory 
of evolution was a masterpiece of loving toil, 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 



197 



and of relentless logic. Darwin 1 was twenty- 
two years in collecting and controlling the ma- 
terial for the " Origin of Species " and the 
"Descent of Man." Wallace, who competed 
with him for the formulation of the evolu- 
tionary law, was submerged like one of their 
own shells in the waves that beat upon the 
shores of the Malay archipelago. These men 
gave their souls and bodies to become students 
of the habits of a mollusk or a monkey, the 
family peculiarities of a bug or a bird, the 
private biographies of a mastodon or a polyp, 
the measurable but imperceptible movement 
of a glacier, the ancestry of a parasite, the 
vanity of a butterfly, the digestion of a fly- 
catcher, the moral nature of a climbing plant, 
or the journey of an insect from one desert 
island to another upon a floating bough. 

Induction, which is as familiar as Bacon, 
and as old as philosophy, became, in the 
hands of the " Greatest since Newton," an ap- 

1 "It occurred to me," lie says, "in 1837, that some- 
thing might perhaps be made out on this question by pa- 
tiently accumulating and reflecting. . . . After five years' 
work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject . . . from that 
period to the present day, I have steadily pursued the same 
object." — Introduction to Origin of Species, published in 
1859. 



198 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

plied force which has taught the century — 
nay, which has taught all time and all truth 
— a solemn lesson. Two things are needed 
to the discovery of a great principle : the 
power to attend, and the power to infer. We 
might add a third, the power to imagine, 
which may be overlooked in the construction 
of important theory ; but, whatever may be 
said of that, the power to attend, coming first 
in order, must be first considered. Darwin's 
colossal success was owing, to an extent which 
it is impossible for a lesser mind to measure, to 
his almost supernatural power of attention to 
the natural ; his superhuman patience of ob- 
servation and record. He observed and re- 
corded as no other man of our day has done ; 
his power of inference proved equal to his ob- 
serving and recording power ; and we have the 
doctrine of evolution by which physical science 
has been the first, but will not be the last, may 
even prove to be the least of human interests 
yet to profit unspeakably. 

It would seem that the trained minds called 
to the leadership of the new psychical move- 
ment have been prompt to turn the geist of 
the century in the last direction in which we 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 199 



should have looked for it. The current that 
wrought marvels out of stocks and stones they 
propose to pour upon air and essence. What 
conquered matter shall assail mind. What 
ordered order shall dominate the disorderly. 
The scientific method shall now rule the un- 
scientific madness, and we shall see what we 
shall see. 

In the metaphysical and in the physical 
worlds the legal fibre is essentially the same* 
The material differs more than the method* 
In this case there exists one distinction : that 
it is in a peculiar sense to the help of the un- 
learned that the learned have appealed in the 
work of the psychical organizations. Here is 
a mass of, let us say, asserted but unverified 
fact, which, if true, is of immeasurable im- 
portance to the interests of the human race. 
Such verification is not, as yet, to be found 
in libraries or in laboratories. Telescope and 
microscope, chip-hammer and retort, do not 
serve the case. The literature of the subject 
is, in great part, untested, illegal, whimsical, 
prehistoric to the spirit of the scientific era, 
and to the spirit in which, if at all, such a 
subject must now be approached. Here we 



200 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

have to deal with an inchoate accumulation 
of mind-facts or soul-facts, of which the mind 
or the soul must be clerk, witness, judge, and 
juror. Here, especially, we have to do with 
confused freshets and land-slides of material 
which, preeminently above other material that 
science has sought to arrange and label, de- 
pends upon the intelligence and veracity of 
human beings for its classification. Here, in 
short, we come yesterday, to-day, and forever, 
jaggedly against the supreme difficulties at- 
taching to the validity and credibility of tes- 
timony. Here, because of the supremacy of 
these difficulties, superstition and science must 
not shoot, but grapple. 

Hence, we see, with a keen sense of their 
wisdom, the officers of the psychical societies 
appealing, at the outset, to the public for co- 
operation in the work of investigating that 
which is hidden, not in desert islands, or in 
glaciers, or in craters, or in crucibles, or in 
cuneiform inscriptions, but in human experi- 
ence. On human intelligence and veracity 
the test must strike ; it would seem that the 
electric light of science blazes white enough 
now, if ever, to try them. Did it seem a du- 



TEE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 201 



bious experiment to flood the English-reading 
world with little circulars asking for authentic 
cases of mind-reading, or visions, as reported 
at first-hand by reporters willing to be per- 
sonally investigated ? Was it with amusement 
that we first saw these dignified gentlemen 
subpoena apparitions from the most intelli- 
gent families ? Did we fall into the automatic 
attitudes of perplexity when English science 
solemnly sent social cards to haunted houses ? 
Did we ask why this precious ointment was 
not sold to the poor, when we saw learned 
men playing the " Willing Game " in country- 
houses to find out whether the human mind 
can get through sealed walls ? And when one 
of the most important philosophical chairs in 
this country is represented on the committee 
inviting spiritualistic mediums to " demon- 
strate to us experimentally their possession of 
peculiar powers," do we sneer or smile? 

If we are wise, we shall do neither. It may 
not be too much to say that the greatest phys- 
ical and metaphysical scholars of our day can 
do no belter thing with their gifts, or their 
greatness, than to apply to the psychical facts 
the sheer force which has conquered the phys- 



202 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

ical — the force that adequately observes and 
records before inferring ; or, as Darwin puts 
it, that " accumulates " before " reflecting." 
As the apostle of evolution collected, collated, 
colligated his enormous array of facts before 
theorizing, they who undertake this other task 
would collect, collate, and colligate the dis- 
array of their facts before they theorize. 

Men have dedicated their lives to the classi- 
fication of an insect, or the cultivation of an ac- 
cent. Why not study the power which makes 
one man able to make another say Peter Piper, 
across the width of the house, with the doors 
shut ? The spirit which gave to the world her 
great scientific gospel devoured itself till it 
knew why the flesh of a creature invisible with- 
out the miscroscope, was of the color of the leaf 
on which it lived and died. Why, then, should 
not a man keep tally of the relative number 
of times that a blindfold subject will select the 
right card from a pack ? " High authorities " 
have wearied themselves to account for the 
difference in the molars and premolars within 
the jaws of the dog and the Tasmanian wolf. 
May not a scientist eat mustard, to see if his 
mesmeric recipient will say that his mouth is 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 203 



burnt ? Or even ask why a valuable piece of 
property stands unrented for a generation, 
because a dead woman is said to be heard sob- 
bing in it? In brief, are not the methods 
which overcome the mysteries of matter en- 
titled to the same exercise and to the same 
respect that they have had, when they are ap- 
plied to the mysteries of mind ? Here, we 
say, are the facts. Hundreds of people, whose 
word of honor is as good intellectual coin as 
that of the reader of this page or the writer 
of this paper have testified to the conveyance 
of thought, without visible or audible or tan- 
gible media, from embodied mind to embodied 
mind ; to the tragic or the trivial incidents of 
mesmerism ; to the coincidence of dreams ; to 
the prophecy of mental convictions ; to the 
visual appearance of the distant living ; to 
the sight or sign of what is thought to be the 
more distant dead. 

Thousands of sensible and reliable men and 
women to - day believe these things on the 
strength of personal experience ; and, believ- 
ing, accept them with such explanation of their 
own as they may, in default of any from silent 
science. It would seem as if these circum- 



204 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

stances were of as much importance to science 
as the transverse lamellae in the beak of a 
shoveler duck, or the climate of the lowlands 
under the equator during the severe part of 
the glacial period. 

A cautious Spiritualist, prominently identi- 
fied with the movements of his sect, in reply to 
inquiries made for use in this paper writes : — 

" I think it would be within bounds to say, that in 
this country, the number who have by personal inves- 
tigation come into what they believe to be a knowl- 
edge of spirit return and manifestation is not less 
than 2,000,000, and that a still larger number have 
experienced enough to satisfy them that there 4 is 
something in it,' but how much they don't know.'' 

Estimates two or three times as large are 
made by less careful zealots. The writer of 
the article on Spiritualism in the " American 
Encyclopaedia," says : — 

44 As the organized bodies of Spiritualists include 
but a small proportion of those who wholly or par- 
tially accept these phenomena, it is impossible to 
make even an approximate estimate of their num- 
ber." 

In Great Britain, the number is supposed 
to be larger than among ourselves. Here, let 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 205 



us say, to take the most modest figures, are 
two millions of our people, intelligent enough 
to conduct the affairs and obey the laws of 
average civilized society, who habitually and 
confidently approach the awful verities of 
death through the unexplained trance which 
we content ourselves with calling a morbid 
nervous condition ; people whose main reli- 
gious faith is formulated — God help them ! — 
in the columns of papers most of which we 
never read if we can help it, or in the pages 
of what they are pleased to call a New Bible, 
spiritually communicated through mediums of 
the sect. Say what we may (and we ought to 
say it) of the nonsense, say what we may of 
the fraud, of the jugglery, the hysteria, the 
blasphemy mixed to a mush with the whole 
matter, the significant fact remains, that here 
is a huge class not of the lowest or most illit- 
erate, while not yet, to any marked extent, of 
the wisest or highest, who believe themselves, 
in our highly-illuminated times, to have found 
some means of access to the consciousness of 
their dead. Here is the massive bulwark of 
the mystery — be it from within or from with- 
out ; were it from above or from below ; call it 



206 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

a base trick or a glorious possibility — where 
the Prince of the Power of the Air intrenches 
himself ; that he gives or assumes to give, or 
is believed to give to the starving human heart, 
bereaved of its bread of life, the crumbs from 
the table of Love and Death. Were it not as 
great a deed, is it not as large a duty, to hunt 
down the facts behind this faith, to grip the 
truth from out this error, to have this law that 
lies between the body and the soul, as it were 
to discover the link between a monkey and a 
man ? 

Modern science is systematically severe in 
the conditions which she lays upon the spirit 
of inquiry. The spirit of inquiry may, in 
turn, demand something of her. We say a 
great deal in these days about the scientific 
basis of thought and action. What do we 
mean by it ? We suppose ourselves to mean 
that a subject shall be approached with two 
qualifications : equipment and candor ; the 
presence of equivalent ability, and the absence 
of nullifying prejudice. These two endow- 
ments we have the right to expect of any in- 
vestigators who penetrate the unexplored upon 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 



207 



the map of Truth. We may assume that the 
eminent officers and members of the psychical 
societies represent a wide enough range of 
training, psychological and physiological, re- 
ligious and skeptical, to deprive us of all ne- 
cessity to question their possession of the first 
of these conditions. As to the latter, we have 
read of the chemist who said to a philosopher : 
"But the chemical facts, my dear sir, are 
precisely the reverse of what you suppose." 
" Have the goodness, then," was the instanta- 
neous reply, " to tell me what they are, that 
I may explain them on my system." Such a 
spirit, which, alas ! is newer than the story, 
would be worse than no spirit at all, in the 
attempt to bring down so subtle and mock- 
ing a truth as that which flies or floats in ob- 
scure psychical phenomena. We have to deal 
now with wings, not clay ; we must use arrows 
and nets, not derricks and dynamite. We 
must take straight lines through infinite ether, 
and measure the velocities of the zephyrs, 
and the atmospheric pressure of mists. We 
have to keep the judgment as open as a cloud 
to the colors of the sun. Our observation 
must be aerometric, 



208 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

There were scholars among the contempo- 
raries of Galileo who never would consent to 
look through a telescope, lest they should be 
compelled to admit the existence of the stars 
which he had discovered. Such intellectual 
palsy is not out of the world's system yet. It 
is the rarest thing upon earth to be fair. It 
is a rarer thing, among what are called sci- 
entific minds, than this paper has space to jus- 
tify itself for asserting. Of all human teach- 
ers, they whose claim to our respect is founded 
most confidently upon their endowment fail 
us sometimes most roundly in this secondary 
qualification of simple, human candor. The 
bigotry of the laboratory and the library is 
quite as robust as the bigotry of the altar and 
the creed. The prcejudicium which is infil- 
trated with matter and fact is as stiff as that 
which has become hygroscopic of mind and 
theory. We hear a great deal about the value 
of scientific evidence. We have the right to 
ask a great deal of the scientific attitude. 
What should it be ? That which George 
Eliot would call one of " massive receptive- 
ness." What must it be ? That which will 
stand the test of its own primer and grammar. 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 209 



Wise are they who would be unsparing as a 
sieve made from the hair on the brows of 
Minerva, in their definition of "evidence;" 
what sifts through those exquisite meshes is 
worth the pains. An imperceptible jar of 
human prejudice may spoil the finest web of 
attention and inference that ever the human 
mind has wrought. It is his first privilege, 
who would take the attitude that qualifies him 
for handling delicate evidence, to see to it that 
his candor is educated equally with his skill. 
We have passed the time when a man might 
assume the name of philosopher, who did not 
hesitate to say that he would rather be in the 
wrong with Plato than in the right with his 
opponents. What is it, indeed, to be can- 
did, but to be willing to see a thing turn out 
either way ? What is the scientific spirit, but 
the honest spirit ? What is the investigating 
power, but the judicial power ? What is it to 
be wise, but to be just ? 

A keen modern writer has well said, that 
by the time a man becomes an authority in 
any scientific subject he becomes a nuisance 
upon it, because he is sure to retain errors 
which were in vogue when he was young, but 



210 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

which a newer wisdom has rejected. Such an 
accusation ought to become, in proportion to 
the enlightenment of the age, unjust or im- 
possible. The qualification of candor should 
grow as fast as that of equipment. As the 
intellectual outfit of scholars multiplies, fair- 
ness in the use of it should increase pro- 
portionately, must increase proportionately, or 
the investigating power " loses stroke " upon 
one side, and we have an eagle with a wing 
crippled seeking to cut a straight course to the 
stars, or expecting the observer to think he 
does. " Were there a single man," says Bacon, 
" to be found with firmness sufficient to efface 
from his mind the theories and notions vul- 
garly received, and to apply his intellect free 
and without prevention, the best hopes might 
be entertained of his success." 

What is it, then, to be great, but to be 
fair ? He who would approach a subject like 
this of which we write, in the sacred name of 
science, needs to be manned for the results, 
be they what they may. This matter is too 
large for any littleness of spirit to grasp. No 
prepossessions are going to get at it. It is not 
time yet for any " working hypothesis." It is 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 211 



too early to have assurances that one thing 
can, or another cannot be. We shall never 
have the truth by inventing it, but by dis- 
covering it. We must be equal to the sur- 
prises of truth. If she beat the breath out of 
our dearest delusions, we must be willing to 
bury them. If she strike the keystone out of 
our firmest convictions, we must be able to 
climb their ruins. I say, without hesitation, 
that no investigator is qualified to pass judg- 
ment upon psychical phenomena, who is not 
equally ready to admit, if admit he must, in 
the end, that he is dealing with the physiolog- 
ical action of cells in the frontal lobes of the 
brain, or with the presence of a human soul 
disembodied by death. He must be hospita- 
ble to a hallucination, or to a spectre. He 
must be, if necessary, just to an apparition 
as well as generous to a molecule. He must 
use the eyes of his soul as well as the lens 
his microscope. He must not be frightened 
away from the discovery of some superb un- 
known law, because there is a vulgar din of 
" Ghosts ! " about his ears. He had better 
find a ghost, if ghost there be, than to find 
nothing at all, for fear it may not be " sci= 



212 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

entific " to walk about after one is dead. 
That does not deserve the name of the sci- 
entific attitude which assumes that the su- 
pernatural is impossible, any more than that 
which assumes that it is necessary. No fore- 
gone conclusion which restricts the nature of 
an undiscovered law to a purely physical basis 
is more scholarly than the bias which preju- 
dicates a superhuman agency behind the dan- 
cing of a piano in the air. It may be just as 
unscientific to assert prematurely that a man 
of honor, intelligence, and education is suffer- 
ing from a mere local affection of the retina, 
when he testifies that he sees and converses 
with the image of his distant brother at the 
moment of that brother's death by accident, as 
it would be to assert that Aristotle expresses 
himself to the American public through the 
columns of the " Banner of Light." It may 
be no more judicial to predetermine that the 
appearance of phosphorescent letters in the 
air, under given conditions, must of necessity 
be a piece of jugglery, than it would be to 
fall upon our knees before it as the work 
of angels, or cross ourselves before it as the 
threat of demons, He may be no more fitted 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY 213 



for psychical research who dismisses a cer- 
tified instance of the clairaudient inter-con- 
sciousness of friends a thousand miles apart, 
as a foredoomed coincidence or exaggeration, 
than he who would accept the " communica- 
tion " of his recently dead son, sent to him 
unsought by the medium who has dared to 
subject the sacred privacy of a stranger's be- 
reavement to the paragraph of the Spiritual- 
istic press, happily unaware that the supposed 
spirit has forgotten, in the educational eleva- 
tion of the disembodied life, how to spell his 
own name. The philosophical faculty may be 
no more exhibited by the student who takes 
it for granted that the raps in a circle of in- 
vestigators are made by knuckles or toe-joints, 
than it is exhibited by the man who guides his 
investments on the advice of a female medium 
who does not know the difference between a 
United States registered bond and Mr. Micaw- 
ber's note-of-hand. To assume that a his- 
torical case of house possession like that of 
Wesley, or his more modern fellow-sufferers, 
is an ingenious trick or a highly-developed rat, 
is perhaps, if we think of it, not much more 
intelligent than to manage one's matrimonial 



214 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

affairs in accordance with the direction of a 
gentleman who examines locks of hair, and 
charges a dollar for his opinion. 

The question : What is evidence ? is a long 
one to answer ; but the question : What is 
prejudice? is short enough. The stiff ma- 
terialist is not educated for a sound investiga- 
tor any more than the limp emotionalist ; and 
the impulse to decry, as a matter of course, 
the mental or psychical basis of obscure phe- 
nomena is scarcely more reasonable than the 
hysteria which hangs upon Indian babble as 
the utterance of the intelligent dead. 

We have said that it is too early to accept 
a working hypothesis. Suppose that the tele- 
pathic theory might explain an immense pro- 
portion (I do not say all) of what are called 
the supernatural facts of Spiritualism ; whether 
it does so, we have not yet " accumulated and 
reflected" enough to say. Both the objec- 
tions to and the arguments for the adaptation 
of telepathy to these phenomena are keenly 
interesting ; but they would require the leis- 
ure of a monograph to discuss them intelli- 
gently. 

There is here, we say, an excellent conjee- 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 215 



ture, so far as it goes. No student of the sub- 
ject can deny that. But no student of the 
subject ought to assume, at this stage of the 
investigation, that telepathy goes far enough. 
Wait. Let us not repeat the blunder of su- 
perstition or of incredulity. Wait. Let us 
have something that will go to the end of the 
matter. Sir Isaac Newton humbly said that 
he had one talent : the ability to look steadily 
at a problem until he saw it through. The 
only hope that we have in dealing with this 
problem of problems lies in the will and the 
power to look at it until we see it through. 
The world has played with the thing long 
enough. Otherwise sensible human beings 
have been the dupes or the cynics of the sub- 
ject from age to age, and from civilization to 
civilization. It is time that the mystery which 
has baffled twenty centuries found its mas- 
ter. Other secrets of force have defied and 
been conquered. Why not this ? Other laws 
have eluded and been grasped. Why not 
this ? Other dangers have been dared, other 
obstacles pulverized, other ridicule or indiffer- 
ence waived, other patience and passion spent 
for other conflicts with the reluctance of na- 



216 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

ture to surrender truth. Why not these, and 
for this ? Here is one fact : the existence 
from all time of a huge sum of inexplicable 
phenomena. Here is another : the intelligent 
human will. At this epoch of our develop- 
ment there ought, if ever, to be an equation 
between the two. The Indian occultist, the 
Jewish sorcerer, the Scotch seer, the Puritan 
witch, the modern medium, have presented but 
so many passing forms of the permanent fact, 
which, like Ahasuerus, has wandered from 
generation to generation, a homeless, deathless, 
unwelcome thing. Like the Spanish knight in 
the song, it 

tl Hides from land to land, 
It sails from sea to sea." 

If the time has come to break lances with it, 
let us do so in downright earnest. 

That was a timely anecdote recalled by one 
of the distinguished investigators in London, 
and attributed to Sir William Hamilton and 
Airey. It was Airey who, Sir William having 
alluded to some important mathematical fact, 
answered : " No, it cannot be." The great 
philosopher gently observed : " I have been 
investigating it closely for the last five months, 



TEE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 217 



and cannot doubt its truth." " But," said 
Airey, " I 've been at it for the last five min- 
utes, and cannot see it at all ! " 

The psychical opportunity, as it may be 
called, takes its due chronological order after 
the great physical opportunity of which mod- 
ern science has already availed itself, and may 
be looked upon as a natural sequence — as a 
case of evolutionary growth in investigation. 
After the more demonstrable comes the more 
elusive ; after the more manifest, the more 
occult. We are now to prepare for what an 
American philosopher calls " the growing pre- 
dominance of the psychical life." 

View it through whatever glass we may, 
there is a chance here for a great discovery 
and for a great discoverer. The day has 
gone when the stock arguments of incredulity 
are strong enough to grip the subject. To 
assume that a large mass of our respectable 
fellow-citizens are either fools or knaves no 
longer quite covers the case. The jugglery 
hypothesis, too often a sound and necessary 
one, is not elastic enough to stretch over the 
circuit ; as in a case of house-possession per- 
sonally known to the writer of this paper, 



218 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

which was carried to the leading prestidigi- 
tator of the day for his professional opinion, 
with the inquiry : Is there anything in your 
business which would explain these occur- 
rences ? " " No ! " was the ringing answer, 
with a terrible thump of the conjurer's hand 

upon the table. " No ! And by I would 

not stay in such a house twenty-four hours ! " 

Science has her superstitions as well as 
faith ; it is the first of these to be supersti- 
tiously afraid of superstition. Only with the 
developed courage which is implied in perfect 
skill are the tactics of truth to be mastered. 
We may say that Science at the bayonet's 
point, before the fortress of Mystery, is put 
upon her mettle at last. Too unscholarly has 
been the sneer or the silence ; too feeble the 
attack ; too serious have been the defeats. 
The moment of the charge has come. Most 
great martial crises create great generals. If 
ever there was a chance for one in the history 
of human knowledge, there is a chance for 
one to-day, and here. 

Shall the power which could classify the 
kingdoms of the earth and claim the glory of 
them be thwarted by the capacity of an un- 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 219 



touched dining-table to thump a man against 
a wall ? Is a " brain-wave " more unmanage- 
able than an ether-wave ? We are taught that 
there are octaves in the wave-lengths of light 
corresponding to octaves in sound-vibrations, 
and that the spectrum has been studied for 
about four octaves beyond the red end, and 
one beyond the violet. Is this a less mys- 
terious accomplishment than the power of the 
human will to act as a substitute for anaesthe- 
sia in a surgical operation ? Is the boldest 
conjecture of telepathy more stupendous than 
the telephone was twelve years ago ? We 
smile when we are told of the telegraphic 
battery constructed for the accommodation of 
what are called spirits who desire to employ 
the Morse alphabet. There are probably few 
readers of this volume who would go beyond 
a smile in regard to such an invention. Yet, 
is the unknown action of mind on mind pos- 
sibly expressed through such a use of the laws 
of electricity more amazing than the phono- 
graph from which we are to hear the treasured 
voices of the dead or absent ? 

Whether we are dealing with matter, mind, 
or spirit, it is too early yet in the process of 



220 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

investigation to know. It is not too early to 
know that one law may be no more illegal 
than another law, and that because we under- 
stand the conditions of one, and do not under- 
stand the conditions of the other, is no more 
of a reason why the other should not exist, 
than Franklin's ignorance of the value of 
shares in the Electric Light Company of New 
York city, to-day, was a reason for not put- 
ting up the first lightning-rods. It is not too 
early to know that the psychical opportunity 
is a great chance for honesty and liberality of 
spirit, for originality and force of mind, for 
attention, for patience, for reason, and, we 
may say, for hope. What benefactors to their 
kind will they be who shall clutch from this 
mystery, ancient as earth, shadowy as dreams, 
and sombre as fate, the substance of a verified 
law ! 

Be it the law which guides the telegraph, 
the law which sways an audience, the law by 
which a hand-pass cures a headache, the law 
which unites the thoughts of distant friends, 
or the law by which dumb death should create 
a vocabulary for deaf life, the chance to for- 
mulate it is the chance for a great achieve- 
ment. Accomplished or defeated, it is an 



THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 221 



achievement for scholarship and for common- 
sense to undertake with a sober, dedicated 
spirit, adequate to the seriousness of the con- 
sequences involved in success or failure. We 
may add, what is sure to be understood by 
some of our readers, and as sure not to be by 
others, that it is an achievement asking also 
for the higher education of that candid and 
noble power imperfectly called spirituality of 
nature. He who has enough of this faculty 
to respect it will follow our meaning. We 
need not tax the patience of him who has not, 
by here emphasizing the relation of such a 
power to the scientific method. 

In physical theory, the gap between the de- 
velopment of the lower and higher organiza- 
tions has never been filled. In religious belief, 
there remains an insoluble mystery about the 
doctrine that claims to mediate between God 
and man. In psychical speculation, too, shall 
we expect a missing link? Will the conjunc- 
tive between life and death elude us ? — the 
combining medium of soul and body defy us ? 
When we have a psychical system lacking no 
more than science and theology lack, we may 
pause, and we should not pause till then. One 
need not be a Spencerian in philosophy, to cry 



222 THE PSYCHICAL OPPORTUNITY. 

with Spencer : " The deepest truth we can get 
at must be unaccountable." 

The Darwin of the science of the soul is yet 
to be. He has a large occasion. It will be 
found greater to explain the dissolution than 
the evolution of the race. It is more to teach 
us where we go to than to tell us what we 
came from. From the " Descent " to the 
" Destiny " of man is the natural step. The 
German physicist who gave his book the su- 
preme title of u The Discovery of the Soul " 
was wiser than he knew. That was a piercing 
satire on the materialistic philosophy which 
suggested, not long since, that mourners here- 
after be given front seats at geological lec- 
tures, and the most deeply bereaved provided 
with chip-hammers to collect specimens. Older 
than the classic of St. Pierre, and young as 
the anguish of yesterday, is the moan : " Since 
death is a good, and since Virginia is happy, 
I would die, too, and be united to Virginia." 

Science has given us a past. Too long has 
she left it to faith to give us a future. Hu- 
man love cannot be counted out of the forces 
of nature ; and earth-bound human knowledge 
turns to lift its lowered eyes toward the firma- 
ment of immortal life. 



VII. 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 

Truth is terrible. She will have her way. 
One law is as inexorable as another law, and 
the mind that fails, from infatuation with one, 
to keep in relation to another, is brought up 
short, somewhere, by the very constitution of 
things. 

One thinks of this not for the first time 
nor for the last one, but explicitly, in watch- 
ing the course of the current of progress with 
which it is our fortune to be contemporaneous. 
No alert observation would deny that investi- 
gation of psychical phenomena has gone above 
the level of a craze or a fashion. It has 
reached the dignity of an intellectual current. 
All momentum has its equivalent force. What 
is the philosophy working beneath the psy- 
chical wave ? 

When Herbert Spencer wrote the famous 
pages which he entitled " The Rhythm of 



224 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE, 



Motion," he gave to the busy world which has 
no time to be scholarly, but which is eager to 
follow the trail of scholarship too great not to 
be comprehensible, a phrase for which we are 
all deep debtors. This term expresses better 
than any of which we have the use, the nature 
of one of the most powerful laws known to the 
universe — the law of vibration. Every cre- 
ated thing oscillates ; this is the amount of 
it. Though we wrought ourselves blind to 
ask the reason, we have not to go beyond the 
timing of our own pulses to learn the fact. 
The petty beat of the pendulum in the kitchen 
clock sways within the majestic diurnal revo- 
lution of the globe. The wave ebbs upon the 
shore ; the tide flows beneath the moon. Your 
telephone message is a shallop set adrift upon 
the ripples of sound. Poetry uses no meta- 
phor when it speaks of the floods of light. 
If a child draw the tip of. a pencil lightly 
across a paper the line will be undulatory. If 
a cannon-ball were uninterrupted by any im- 
peding body, it would return to the spot 
whence it started. A baby's cry rises and 
drops from insistence to subsidence. An 
American storm, spanning the continent from 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



225 



Montana to Maine, begins as a " blizzard " 
and ends as a zephyr. A weed growing at 
the bottom of a brook undulates. The use of 
the telescope teaches that every pulsation of 
the heart jars the room. Both lateral and 
vertical oscillations beset the motion of a 
railway train. The songs that muse of " wind- 
ing rivers " sing above the law of conflict be- 
tween the current and the channel. A leaf 
trembles in the wind, and the climate of the 
earth is affected by changes of position " tak- 
ing twenty-one thousand years to complete." 
Sleep visits the blessed once in twenty-four 
hours, and awful periodicities control the jaws 
of earthquakes which swallow cities. An in- 
termittent fever and a variable star obey the 
same authority. Sunrise and sunset, season 
and season, life and decay, are the throbs of 
one mighty circulation poured from an unseen 
Heart. 

These things we are taught as the alphabet 
of modern philosophy. We are told that 
the law leans over, far beyond the scope of 
physics ; that the human mind, like the ulti- 
mate atom, serves the large decree ; and that 
human experience itself is a slave to the eter- 



226 



TEE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



nal rhythm. We are reminded that grief and 
joy and hope and anguish alternate as much 
as the budding and the fading of a wind- 
flower* We are asked to observe that misery 
has its paroxysms as well as neuralgia ; and 
that mourners smile because they have wept, 
and weep again, since they did smile. We are 
reminded that crime and pestilence pulsate in 
epidemics across the globe. We are called 
upon to record the throbs of the pendulum of 
history, whose swing sweeps from civilization 
to ruin, from the people to the throne, from 
tyranny to riot, from confusion to order, from 
morality to madness, from atheism to bigotry, 
from despair to faith. 

We are asked, in short, to see for ourselves, 
by a review of that close collation of facts 
which the philosophy as well as the science 
of our day delights to honor, that vibration is 
the condition of motion, and that motion is the 
condition of life. 

But we are asked to remember yet another 
thing. The figure of the cone of history is 
almost as old as historical philosophy ; but the 
youngest of our thinkers would fall back upon 
it, who told us to-day that spiral law holds 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



227 



over or holds into rhythmic law. A thing or 
a thought works to and fro, but that is not 
all ; it works spirally to and fro. For growth 
or for decline, to the base or to the apex — in 
the phrase of modern thought, to evolution or 
to dissolution — it is in the nature of motion 
to tend. Rhythm is not a simple affair. It 
is a complication. There is rhythm within 
rhythm, motion over against motion ; move- 
ment double, quadruple, complex — if we do 
not say infinite, it is because we are too finite 
to follow the coil. 

The vibration of the violin string seems a 
simple affair of molar disturbance producing 
sound-waves. Who shall say what was the 
rhythm started in the soul of the peasant who 
heard Ole Bull play in a tavern, and, amid the 
hush of his fellows — moved beyond them all 
— brought his hand down thunderously upon 
a table and cried : " This is a lie ! " 

Materialism is not the best word in the 
world to define an aspect of modern thought, 
for which, on the whole, for our purposes, 
there may be no better. It stands, at least in 
the minds of most of us, for something defi- 
nite, in the press of many indefinite views 



# 



228 THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 

as to the nature or the outcome of a conflict 
which is sweeping us all along, soldier and 
civilian, whither we would, or whither we 
would not. The thing which is represented 
in a measure by this word has carried a 
high hand, and had a merry day of it. The 
age has succumbed to what it has called its 
tendency as thoroughly as a hearty boy to the 
measles. We have had it hard. It has been 
thought a feature of force of character not to 
believe too much. Dilettante doubt has made 
bric-a-brac of the gate called Beautiful that 
guarded the temple. All the iconoclasts of 
wit and wisdom have hacked at the shrine. 
To be learned, it has been understood, was 
not to be devout. In proportion to one's 
knowledge one failed to believe. It has been 
the great effort of the time to establish a 
mathematical equation between an instructed 
mind and an abandoned faith. The mere hold- 
ing of certain views has been accepted by a 
powerful class of thinkers as the tattoo-mark of 
intellectual barbarism. Did you not know that 
an immortal soul was old-fashioned? Have 
you not understood that God is out of date ? 
Then go to. Teach your Sunday-school. Join 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



229 



a female prayer - meeting. Write religious 
verses. Leave knowledge to science and truth 
to men. 

This has been the spirit of the times, and it 
must be admitted that it has been a successful 
spirit. Precious thing after precious thing 
has crumbled before it. Pearls have been 
dimmed. Hopes have been hurled from great 
heights to heavy depths. Daylight has dark- 
ened. It has gone hard with us to keep the 
faith-cells in our brains. Dear beliefs of souls 
dearer and better than our own have slipped 
out of our yearning arms as the dead slip 
into the coffin. Many an honest and ear- 
nest man in the last decade or two has ]ost 
out of his faith what he would give his life to 
regain, and call himself happy at the price. 
Silent hours wrung from busy lives will an- 
swer; secrets of reticent hearts will lift up 
mute faces to the question : Went the day sore 
with ye ? 

We have looked on while disrespect for the 
unseen, in the name of science, has torn at the 
vitals of everything which makes life worth 
living, or death a great opportunity. We 
have endured while murder in the name of 



230 THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 

surgery has been done upon the fair body of 
truth. We have suffered while the sweet 
reasonableness of human hope has writhed un- 
der the scalpel of its vivisectors. There has 
been no anaesthetic for that anguish. Ask. 
Any man will tell you who has known it. 

They had their day, and they used it. We 
learned that we were not men, but proto- 
plasm. We learned that we were not spirits, 
but chemical combinations. We learned that 
we had laid up treasure in the wrong places. 
We learned that the Drama of Hamlet and 
the Ode to Immortality were secretions of the 
gray matter of the brain. We learned that 
guilt was nothing but the law of heredity. 
We learned that one's prehistoric amoeba (if 
anybody) should be blamed for one's private 
vices. We learned that beyond the fugitive 
slaves which we call the joys of this life, and 
the disproportionate pains which are their 
masters, we had not an expectation. Going 
hounded down to death, and crying out for 
the emancipation of eternal happiness, we 
learned that we had not a hope to our names. 

We learned — no, no, thank God, we never 
learned to lay the beloved of our lives at the 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 231 



bottom of a grave and leave them there. We 
have never come without a pause to the end of 
the Apostate's Creed : — 

" I believe in the Chaotic Nebula, self-existent 
Evolver of heaven and earth . * * in the disunion 
of saints . . . the dispersion of the body, and in 
Death Everlasting. Amen." 

The modern philosophy has at one point 
prepared itself to fall a victim to its own 
logic. It has given registered bonds to the 
law of rhythm. It has omitted to remember 
that the history of all human belief is the his- 
tory of oscillation, and that it must itself take 
its turn and meet its fate, like other human 
pulsations. The creed of negation, the cultus 
of death, has risen to its crest, and toppled. 
There came to our ears a wail of despair for 
the race at which the stoutest trembled. Was 
it the roar of the ocean of all time ? Nay ; 
look abroad ; it was but the rustle of a brain- 
wave on the shore. The time is at hand. The 
moment of the ebb has come. This is the 
law. They who took away from us the only 
hopes that made existence anything else than 
a stupendous tyranny perpetrated upon a de- 
frauded race, shall see their dark work come 



232 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



surging back from the cap to the trough. This 
is the law. Long have they taught us the 
rights of such autocracy. Well have they 
worshiped the Law of Nature. In the way of 
social position, they would take nothing less 
for it than the Throne of God. By the creeds 
of their own deeds they shall be judged, or 
there is no conclusion in logic and no unity 
in history. In an old French picture demons 
toss a lost soul from one to the other, like a 
ball. Truth, which fares hard in an untruth- 
ful world, meets here a fate as restless. This 
is the law. 

In the parlance of philosophy, we are told 
that the force embodied as momentum in a 
given direction cannot be destroyed ; and that, 
even if it disappear, or seem to disappear, it 
reappears in the form of reaction on the re- 
tarding body. The easy illustration of the 
tuning-fork is used to remind us that " as 
much force as the finger exerts in pulling 
the prong aside, so much opposing force is 
brought into play among the cohering parti- 
cles. Hence, when the prong is liberated, it is 
urged back by a force equal to that used in- 
deflecting it." 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



233 



The materialistic sound-wave has turned. 
This, he that slumbereth can hear. It will be 
nothing new in human story if we are called 
upon to observe that the ebb is at least as 
great as the flow. The exerting force, we 
must remember, not only meets its opposing 
force, it creates its opposing force. This is 
the law. 

It has been written of the father of Goethe 
that he had no spiritual elements in him by 
which his weak points could be transformed 
into strong ones. What is true of a given 
type of character is true of a corresponding 
type of belief. In the whole Agnostic direc- 
tion of motion there lacked the spiritual ele- 
ment by which its weak points could be con- 
verted into strong ones, thus to stand out 
against the crisis of the ebb and be carried 
over into the next vibration in a form likely 
to perpetuate the vitality of the last. 

I think one may venture the assertion that 
the ruling philosophy of our day has done 
nothing more important than the arousing of 
a tremendous resistance to itself. This re- 
sistance promises to be, at the least, as pow- 
erful as the force which it resists. The inex- 



234 THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



orable rhythm has begun in the motion of 
thought. A theory should be a gun. It should 
never shoot without calculating on the recoil. 
The materialist did not calculate upon the 
recoil ; and the recoil has come. In the hun- 
ter's phrase, his weapon has kicked. 

It has been said of Lessing that he knew 
but one system of tactics, which was with 
fixed bayonet to run his rival through the 
body. " He made no prisoners. When the 
work was over there was nothing left of his 
antagonist." The skepticism of our day has 
made too many prisoners ; and her prisoners 
\ are escaping beneath her eyes. 

The interesting thing, however, about the 
whole matter is the point of the compass at 
which the dungeon walls have been broken. 
Or, to keep to our figure, it is the direction of 
motion in which the rhythm has swung. One 
who has thought up to a certain point on these 
questions will not hesitate to say that the psy- 
chical wave upon which we have been caught 
is the outcome — direct, logical, and legal — 
of the physical wave in which we have been 
buried. This is the law. It has taken an ex- 
traordinary form. This is the curiosity. 



TEE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



235 



We have been taught that rhythm is a 
complication ; that there is rhythm within 
rhythm, motion lateral and vertical, movement 
on an axis, and movement in an orbit and 
movement in a spiral ; in short, that oscillation 
is not a simple affair of two strokes. The 
vibration may start where it is not expected. 
The pulsation may hit athwart where logic was 
not great enough to look for it. This is pre- 
cisely what has happened. 
< If any of the priests and prophets of the 
materialistic philosophy had been told fifteen 
years ago, while they sat precipitating our 
souls into a sub-acetate in their laboratories, 
or offering us little icicles from the Glacial 
Period to replace the Easter lilies on the new- 
made grave, that more than one of the fore- 
most scientists of Great Britain would be to- 
day avowed believers in the psychical nature 
of obscure phenomena, such as it has hith- 
erto been considered good intellectual form to 
turn over to the juggler and the medium — 
but imagination cannot struggle beyond the 
learned smile with which such a suggestion 
would have been bowed out. On the certif- 
icate of the scientific world, mad Cassandra 



236 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



would have been incarcerated in an institu- 
tion offering all the modern improvements 
in alienism, had she foretold a vibration of 
thought like that of which this fact is the 
sonometer. 

The burliest positivist is not more puzzled 
at the present growth among us of the psy- 
chical life than the religious believer. As lit- 
tle as it was to be conceded that men who had 
been instructed in the physiological basis of 
life could ever interest themselves in the con- 
veyance of an impression from one mind to 
another mind without the intervention of phys- 
ical media; so little was it to be dreamed 
that the rescue of faith should be attempted 
through a table-tipper, or a trance-subject, or 
an Oriental mystic. Priest and physicist are 
at one in their perplexity. He who sat down 
to rest from his labors in the belief that he 
had slain the chimera of the human soul with 
his chip-hammer, and he who has been de- 
voutly praying Heaven to arrest the chip- 
hammer by a miraculous revival of religion, 
are alike conscious of surprise. It is not 
within the organism of the church, it is not 
within the social ranks of faith, that the pen- 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



237 



dulum has begun to swing. If, because of 
praying for it, Heaven knows — that is a ques- 
tion for supernatural science to answer — yet 
not in the direction of praying for it has the 
pulsation started. Outside of all organism, 
rank, faith, and direction, the resisting force 
has sprung. If we were using the military 
figure, we should say it is a flank movement. 
From the oscillatory point of view, it is a coun- 
ter-current. So unique is it, so apparently 
hostile to undulatory law, while yet so subtly 
obedient to it, that we might call it a tide-rip. 

At any rate, here we are. Carried along 
upon a roller of reaction from the explicit, 
the world is well-nigh going over a cataract 
after the mysterious. Silken society seeks 
what it is pleased to call the esoteric, as it 
would seek a new waltz or an original dinner- 
card. We hear of a Chela served up for 
lunches, as if he were the last new poet, or a 
humming-bird on the half-walnut shell. A 
live Theosophist is a Godsend in a dead draw- 
ing-room. A brother from the resources of 
Indian occultism carries us in chains. We 
urge him to throw a rope into the sky, climb 
up and take it with him ; it is a disappoint- 



238 



TEE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



ment if the Axminster carpet does not serve 
as hopeful a basis for this purpose as his 
native jungle. 

What is dubbed the Mind-cure runs riot 
even among people who really have minds to 
be cured. One is waylaid upon corners by 
one's educated friends, and besought to take 
one's personal share of the universal disorder 
to a woman who sits with the back of her 
chair against the back of yours, and tells you 
that there is (like the distinguished Mrs. 
Harris) " no such a person " as your pet 
bronchitis, or the sick-headache inherited from 
your grandfather. It is not to the purpose of 
this paper to assert or to deny the cures re- 
ported to be wrought by this form of mysti- 
cism, but only to enumerate the form in its 
place among the others as significant of the 
present state of things. In some parts of our 
country it has had a significance truly enor- 
mous and almost incredible. 

Telepathy, the new word for the old thing, 
gives us plenty of occupation. We seek to 
establish the telephonic connections of the 
unaided human mind, as eagerly as Professor 
Bell fights for his right and his patents. Sep- 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



239 



arated friends make appointments to meet 
in dreams, or to " break - house " from the 
body, and take twilight journeys together in 
the liberated spirit. Our sympathetic coin- 
cidences are brought out and trotted down the 
psychical race-course. Our family ghosts are 
beckoned from their attics and feted hand- 
somely for the first time in their lives. If we 
are the happy possessors of a genuine life- 
apparition, we try the theories of brain-waves 
upon it, as a costumer drapes a dummy ; and, 
if the garment fits, so much the better for the 
dummy. 

The spiritualistic seance has risen from the 
bottom to the top. It floats upon the smooth 
surface of society easily. Mediums have their 
fashions, like bonnets. They are put on or off 
as the season or the mode decrees. Personal 
beauty or a gentle manner goes well to their 
capital. In parlors to w r hich they are unaccus- 
tomed they materialize flowers and play upon 
invisible violins. Circles strange to the oc- 
cupation tip tables with the gas down, and 
shudder when the medium shrieks, or the fin- 
ger-touches of the invisible stroke the paling 
cheek. 



240 



TEE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



Beneath these popular amusements thou- 
sands of men and women are paying their two 
dollars a " communication " for messages from 
their dead, and carrying spirit - photographs 
happily identified by the mourners in lockets 
on their hearts. 

On the other hand, quietly, and above them 
all, the students of the subject sit hard at 
work, tabulating authentic marvels, elaborat- 
ing diagrams of digit-tests, and inventing com- 
bined die-throwers and tally-keepers to prove 
or to disprove the existence of the transfer- 
ence of thought without physical agency ; in- 
vestigating hypnotism, mesmerism, the witch- 
hazel, apparitions, trances, and the rest of it, 
in their own fashion and with their own ad- 
mirable thoroughness ; but divided among 
themselves in what we may call the prejudice 
of the result, as much as the Church itself is 
split asunder on the vital differences of reli- 
gious creed. Thus and here we are. I would 
not be understood as flinging the toss of a 
phrase against any of these forms of the pre- 
vailing interest in psychical facts ; as though 
one could say of any one of them, the maddest 
or the silliest, that there is nothing in it. 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



241 



There is something in them all. Let it be- 
come the task rather than the whim of the 
times to find out what. 

Now as we have already noticed, no one for- 
gets that this sort of thing has happened, in 
varying degrees, before. Mystery is as old 
as life. The medium of New York and the 
Witch of Endor are of one family. Magic 
and marvel are as ancient as the fire which 
came down from heaven and "respected" the 
burnt-offering of Abel. Cotton Mather took 
a bewitched girl home to exorcise her, and 
Mesmer did not hesitate to claim that for 
twenty years he had magnetized the sun. 
Superstition has swollen fact and curiosity 
has gone mad over the phenomenal, many a 
day and oft. The world has never been able 
to get away from the inexplicable and the 
unseen. The point of chief interest now is 
that the scientific method meant she should. 
Its apostles were to have changed all that. 
Nothing was more to be expected. It was a 
part of the new Gospel. In depriving us of 
hope they were to rid us of superstition, and 
the result was counted worth the cost. 
} Let it, on the contrary, be noted that the 



242 



TEE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



opposite has definitely happened. One would 
wish to give the emphasis of under-statement 
to a point like this, in saying that it has been 
reserved for the scientific age to experience 
such an uprising of forces not yet amenable to 
science, hitherto scorned by science, and wholly 
at odds with what has been the spirit of sci- 
ence up to this time, as must constitute in it- 
self a phenomenon when witnessed in a period 
of such intelligence and incredulity. 

From the last spot where danger was 
dreamed of the recoil has started. From the 
very reservoirs of superstition the flood has 
come. Not of the might of men, not of reason, 
nor of faith, the current has swung into the 
channel. From the illegal, the unclassified, 
from the despised and rejected — as before 
in the great awakenings of life — the power 
pours. A Greater than the method of the 
age is in it. Bound in the flesh of a philos- 
ophy without a hope and without a spirit, we 
see that there has come upon us a deep move- 
ment of invisible forces toward invisible truths. 
This is the motion of rhythm. This is the re- 
sistance of reaction. This is the law. 

One of the popular romances of the day 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



243 



deftly recognizes these facts in the tale of a 
city beleaguered by the dead, who drive the 
living beyond the walls and close the gates 
upon them, because they have not perceived 
" the true significance of life." 

Louis Q.uafcorze went one day to chapel and 
listened to the court clergyman, who, in a mo- 
ment of forgetf ulness, ventured to make the 
rash assertion, — 

" We must all die." 

The king made an impatient movement. 

" Yes, sire," hastily interpolated the poor 
preacher, " almost all ! " 

The chief trouble with the materialistic 
philosophy seems to have been that we must 
almost all die. Death is a fact which has not 
been created for the main purpose of confirm- 
ing this philosophy in those more persuasive 
features by which truth appeals to the human 
reason. The theory which shuts us into our 
coffins, screws the lid down, and says, " Now 
get out if you can ! " lacks certain elements 
of the permanently pleasing or convincing to 
which mankind are still sensitive. 

Death is either a glorious chance or it is an 
awful outrage. To every hope that leans or 



244 THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 

leaps beyond it, they shall be bound over who 
wrenched that hope away from us. Every 
man who has laid his dearest dead away in 
the dust and ashes of the spirit of the age, 
every heart that has known the isolation of a 
lost belief in the unseen, every uncomforted 
and comfortless lifting of life out of which 
faith has departed, every untold pang, every 
ghastly terror, every bitter tear, all frost-bitten 
tenderness and reverence and human lowliness 
of heart, and happy looking for blessed, bet- 
ter things to be — these, all these, to the ut- 
termost, shall go to swell the great receding 
wave. Force is not lost. The molecular dis- 
turbance of despair, when it comes to the ebb, 
shall go over to form the rising tide of hope. 

By this way or by that, from superstition, 
or from science, or from faith, or from philos- 
ophy, with the impartiality of all profound 
human movements, the oscillation will take 
care of itself ; but it will come. 

We have not all of us the auditory nerve of 
the great musician who, at the age of four, in- 
sisted that he heard the blue-bells ring ; but 
an ear less fine can hear strange harmonies in 
the restless air to-day. 



THE PSYCHICAL WAVE. 



245 



Seek it as they will — if by sage or seer, 
though in folly or in wisdom — it is not to 
be denied that men are concentrating their 
curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their research 
npon the preservation of the human soul. 

It is impossible to avoid the question : Is 
this, too, another wave to burst in bubbles on 
the long shore ? But it is reasonable to ask 
if it may not be the swirl of the whirlpool 
whose spiral motion (such is the law) fathoms 
the depths of truth, and, by the protective 
power of the spiritual element, carries the 
diver who dares within reach of the buried 
treasure. 



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